Ready. Set. Revise.

I've been steadily revising my first draft of Through the Woods (That Book I Wrote During NaNoWriMo). When I wrote the first draft, I left myself notes and reminders in the comments section for things I knew I would have to come back to and edit.

Some of these notes are just place-markers for major changes, like “From this point on, the cat is a girl not a boy. Make sure the cat gets turned into a girl from here back.”

But some of the notes are major [facepalm] moments that made me laugh out loud reading them. Here are a few of my favorites – I did edit the comments a bit so that my mom won’t shoot me for putting curse words on my blog. Love you Mama!

• Oh crap – remember that Sam’s feet are all bandaged up? I think you forgot that in the creek scene. Also, she needs dry clothes like bad
• Fix this; Sam doesn't have dry clothes.
• Don’t forget that her feet are all f***ed up
• Just realized I forgot to write that cat into the last couple of scenes. Got back and add the little critter.
• This is lame. Fix it.
• Dude. Did you forget that she has a sprained wrist and has her arm in a sling after this? Yes you did. Fix that shit.
• Wait…. Is this what we named it? Check on that.
• No really, fix this shit. 

I think I’m most entertained by how I started referring to myself in the plural by the end of the book. We have a lot of fun revising.

Plot Driven

Another writer (Megan Reed) recently posted her tactics for formulating the plot of her novel. She writes out each scene on an index card and tacks them onto a push-pin board. She can then fill in any holes and see the whole story-line at once.

I love this idea. It reminds me a bit of writing research papers in college - not the sleepless nights and coffee induced heart palpitations, but the way I would divide the paper down into its usable parts to make the task of writing a 30+ page research paper more manageable.

I'm going to try this with my novel for NaNoWriMo 2014 and see what happens.