Monday, October 17, 2016

It's Revision (and Outline) Week

I'm fortunate enough to have a job with paid vacation time, and a boss that doesn't mind me taking off to write. My novel work (drafting and editing) tends to get planned out in advance, and because NaNoWriMo is coming up next month with Loscon taking up the majority of the Thanksgiving weekend, I know that my writing time (and writerly activity time) is going to be jammed.

I plan on drafting a new novel during NaNoWriMo, which I've done for the past three years. I find I work well with that kind of schedule, because it lets me keep the whole story relatively fresh in my head, resulting in less continuity errors. There's nothing like realizing you've lost a character for a whole afternoon in a story with a compressed timeline to make you wonder if there might be a better work process to avoid to that. (Better note-taking probably would have helped too.)

Anyway, my November is going to be packed and I have a number of shorter works that I've been meaning to revise. They're stories that were drafted without a specific market in mind so I never finished the revision process, or stories that may have not have turned out as well as I wanted.

Most of them are complicated multi-scene novelettes that require a deeper assessment on whether not all those scenes are necessary. Whatever the reason, I've been hesitant to send them out, but they're doing me zero good sitting on my hard drive.

So I'm taking this week off and devoting at least three days to improve three stories.

Any time remaining will go into working on my outline for my upcoming NaNoWriMo novel, which is still in the throwing things at the wall to see what subplots I'm going to have phase. Thankfully the main plot is pretty set.

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