Revision Science (sort of)

Been pretty quiet on the ol' blog lately. Sorry about that.

I am hard(ish) at work on getting my revisions for Seer sorted out, and am pleased with the results so far, even though I haven't made any actual changes to the manuscript yet. I'm working exclusively with the scene-list outline I compiled during my read through a couple weeks ago, and am loving this method—it's forcing me to focus on the big picture instead of getting hung up on the details of the prose, which is helping a proverbial ton with my pacing issues.

There's a heck of a lot of new scenes getting added in (mostly having to do with developing a character barely mentioned in Draft #1), lots of rearrangement, and of course some inevitable deletion. What's great about doing all this revision on the outline is there's no risk of accidentally messing something up in the manuscript, plus it saves you from reading the novel so many times you haven't a clue after a while if you're helping it or hurting it.

I'm pretty excited about all these changes! The novel is going to be sooooo much better (and stronger! and actually coherent!) when I'm done with it. Kinda makes you wonder why on earth I couldn't have come up with all this stuff the first time around, but I think sometimes you have to do something one way in order to figure out that's not the way you wanted to do it at all. First drafts are like science experiments—you don't know what's gonna happen until you try. Revisions clean up the inevitable mess, lay everything out in an orderly fashion, and calmly put it back together right.

Or something.

At any rate, I'm in Chapter Fifteen on the outline, so I'm a little over halfway there. Can't wait to finish so I can actually get these changes made.

Onwards and upwards!