At the rate I’m going this year, I may actually have a completely revised (and possibly ready to pitch) manuscript.

Since I started working through Jim Jackson’s revision and self-editing process in January, I’ve made it through the total read-through and identified the major changes. Yes, I’ve been at it since January, but it’s not like I’ve put in eight hours a day on the project. In fact, I did some rough math and calculated I’ve actually spent a little more than week and a half on this project. If I didn’t have other “retirement” activities, I might have finished the entire revision by now.

But I do have other activities and, frankly, I don’t plan to drop too many more of them. I have a couple of board memberships that will expire next spring, but by then I may have a solid revision plan to work with.

About 20 hours of the time I’ve spent has been playing with different methods of reorganizing my plot without actually getting the job done. It’s been a sometimes frustrating, sometimes tedious, and often colorful process as I tried various methods of reordering my scenes. I’ve dug out old easel-pads, notecards, flags and highlighters, not to mention pens with a variety of ink colors. I’ve also tried Excel forms and Photoshop image editing.

Part of the time I’ve spent making myself some graphics. One overlays Jane K. Cleland’s plot roadmap (from Mastering Suspense, Plot and Structure) and Jessica Brody’s plot beats (from Save the Cat! Writes a Novel). I like both plans but, for me, combining them helped me feel more comfortable with both my plot and my pacing. And now I have a structure I won’t have to reconstruct next time I start revising one of my many NaNoWriMo drafts. (You remember, NaNo–the defunct National Novel Writing Month, formerly celebrated in November.) And that bit of work should save me at least half a week for each new draft.

Until I started re-reading the 360-plus pages of my 2022-23 draft of my 2020 NaNo novel, I’d been focused on words, not the bigger picture. Oh, I still like my opening scene. That won’t change much because I know it’s where the story starts. It’s a murder mystery, after all, and you need somebody to find a body fairly early. But last time I read it was when I took Jim’s Guppy class, and I knew a big volunteer project would keep me from really focusing on the class and its homework. I have never been gladder for saving my notes!

I was still focused on the opening pages when I sent 50 of them to an agent last November. But back then I was toying with multiple points-of-view (POVs, as we call them). I worked those in when I was frustrated by having written the original in first person POV and, as a graduate of both the old Writer’s Police Academy and the so-far, one-time Cop Camp, I wanted my law enforcement and first responder world to be accurate. But on this read-through, I realized this particular story was never meant to be a police procedural. So, most of what I learned from those workshops will be “deep background” to help keep me on track as I move through the story.

Now, though, I have really focused on what’s in the most recent draft, what scenes are clear in my head but never actually found their way to my pages, and moved scenes from where I thought of them during NaNo into spots where they actually move the story along, I think, more effectively.

And when I finish spending some time with my youngest and his family in early April–one of those other retirement activities I have no plans to give up–I’ll be ready to jump back into the revision process at the next step. And I’m looking forward to it.

À bientôt!