Woman At Work

I've gone ahead and jumped into revision. It's only been four or five weeks as opposed to the six weeks I planned to set it aside, but I had a good reason to start. A week or two ago thoughts began to pop into my head like, That novel probably sucks, and, It's not on the right reading level, and, You put in too many confusing plot points, and, That novel really is going to suck when you read it again. The thoughts were getting me down and I could tell I was approaching the point when I would give up on it altogether. Without even reading it over again!

There was only one remedy: Start revising. It's a good feeling; I see tons of things that are not going to work in the manuscript, but on the plus side, I can dive in and try to fix them. I'm using the Stein method of triage like I posted here. The good and bad thing about his method is that I'm working on the really big elements before I read the whole manuscript through. That means the hard work comes first. It also means a lot of the hard work will be done by the time I read it through word by word.