About to Enter...

There's a place one of my favourite bloggers, Karen Mahoney, calls the Revision Cave. The Revision Cave is cold, dark, lonely, and very long.

Truth be told, I'm scared of the Revision Cave. And I'm about to enter it.

Due to my insane amount of writing, and procrastination of revison, I will soon have four first draft novels to revise. All of these novels are 100,000+ words, and its going to take a long time to revise them all. Yesterday, I decided that I had to stop being scared of the Revision Cave, and actually enter it sometime soon. I'm going to finish the fourth first draft by the end of summer (maybe sooner), and after that, I'm doing no more writing until the NaNoWriMo in November. I'm effectively banning myself to the Revision Cave for over two months. And while it's going to be hard, it'll be good for me. I'm starting some new courses and resuming my job, and other things in September (I'm on a break at the moment), so things will get busy. There will be less time to write, though I'll make time for it when November comes. And I'm in dire need of revisions.

I actually started doing some editing today. Usually, I hate it. When I'm trying to revise things on the computer, it's harder to see the flaws. So today I took the initiative to print some chapters out from the first novel I'm redrafting, and I couldn't believe what a difference it made. It was so much easier to see the flaws! I now have a whole chapter filled with red pen, scrawled with changes and instructions and things to add and take away, and while it is a little bit of a mess, its the first real progress I've made revision wise in a long time. And the most surprising thing ... I enjoyed it. Maybe the Revision Cave won't be so bad, or maybe it's because I'm only starting to crawl into it.

Wish me luck. It's going to be a long journey...