Revision Process and Other Things

As always, the two weeks I promised in the previous post has turned into a few months. I'd apologize but I know for a fact that I haven't learned my lesson. I'll prove that five months from now when I post again.

In all seriousness, there hasn't been much going on until now. So I haven't had much reason to post. My nose has been to the grindstone, if you will, and that's good. Right?

First, the novel. 'Air'. The first draft has been completed! I did as I said: I buttoned up characters, timelines, plots, etc. The plan worked out really well for me. In the end, a few scenes had to be added, others cut. Now it flows, at least as much as first drafts are supposed to. There's one thing I decided not to do.

After printing out the entire thing, a phone-book-sized work of 630 pages, I decided to simply put it on a shelf and not show anyone. No one. Not even myself. There's a lot of good advice out there on the 'Googles' about editing. One such article is from Wendy Mass's blog post. I plan to lean on it quite a bit when the time is right. But the time isn't right. I'm going to wait. I figure, how can I edit something from an outsider's perspective when I lived it for three months straight. The last part of the each sentence would pop in my head before my eyes got there. So I put the first draft aside. It'll sit on my bookshelf, tucked in among works by Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Peter Abrahams and others until July 1st. With luck, maybe some form of osmosis will happen, but even if it doesn't, I'll crack it open at the beginning of July, red pen at the ready. So what to do until then? That leads me to my next bit of news.

I've been writing a short story for the past few weeks, and as of last Saturday, it's been in the hands of my beta readers. They've been amazingly helpful. While I definitely need to fine tune the thing, the good news is that the story isn't too far off key. My goal is to coral all the feedback, make necessary changes and start submitting the story by July 1st. This story, by the way, is called 'For Davey'. I added a synopsis to the Stories and Novels page.

That's it! I promise to post status updates about both the novel revision progress as well as the short story submission status. But notice that I'm not promising as to when.

Thanks for reading!

-- Tim