I didn’t know exactly what to expect before I got it and I already had a few changes of my own that I wanted to make so it was with nervous anticipation that I clicked open the email from my editor, Emily Meehan.
I read through her notes about five different times and they were good, really good but I was at a loss at how to start tackling the issues she had listed on six neatly typed pages.
So I created the most convoluted system to revise your novel. Note: you will need to make a trip to an office supply store, a teacher supply store and the liquor store.
Here’s a picture to help explain what I did:
As you can see, I’ve got a lot of stuff
going on. When I broke my editorial letter down - I had 26 items that needed
fixin’. Yes, I’m from the South, we say fixin’. So each item got a note card
and I jotted a few notes about how I would make these changes. Each note card then
got its own cute colored-coded sticker. (I picked smileys, pushpins and stars but
go with whatever works for you!)
I read my manuscript again. If I can across a part of the story that had anything to do with one of my 26 items – I put the corresponding sticker on that page, then noted the page number where that item appears in the manuscript on the back of the card.
Are you ready for a drink yet?
When my manuscript was full of stickers and the backside of my cards covered in page numbers, I went to the computer and started revising.
After all revisions were made, I printed another copy and did one final run through – you know, to see if there were one or two things that needed cleaning up.
Here’s a picture of what that looked like:
 |
| In my defense, 90% of these were type-o's |
Now am I 100% sure that there is a better way to do this – YES! But what I needed, especially after being knee deep in Book 2, was to re -familiarize myself with Book 1. And this process did it for me. And I found some patterns that allowed me to fix two problems with one solution. Not sure if I would have seen it like that if I wouldn’t have done it this way.
But no matter how crazy my method – I’m done. That is until round 2…
