Restarting Editing

Super excited that I got my act together enough last night to reopen edits for Touchstone. I’ve been avoiding it for MONTHS, not – shockingly – because I’ve been sick but because I’ve been annoyed by the fact of having to do it at all πŸ˜› It’s hard and effortful and I just. don’t. wanna. πŸ˜›

Writing novels with ADHD is a Thing. Touchstone took me basically a year to draft, and at 92,000 it’s actually not quite done – the climax is missing, so at least 3 or 5 chapters at about 2000 words each. That’s potentially another 10k of writing, which at kind of averageish speeds for me (not that that means ANYTHING any more) might take a month, maybe three weeks.

But yeah, after working on it solid for a year, and having to focus ONLY on that project (well, mostly only, we all know lots of small things crept in around the edges because they always do :D), my brain is DONE with the book. The prospect of spending another 6ish (maybe more??? it’s been forever since I wrote/edited a full novel, and this is the longest book I’ve ever written) MONTHS before I am allowed to a) call this book done and b) choose a new chunky project to work on? URGH. URGH URGH URGH URGH URGH.

DOAN. WANNA.

So. I am Much Pleased that I was able to cajole myself into actually cracking it open again last night. Probably I ought to reread the whole thing again at this point – it’s been a couple of months since I did a first-pass read through and made a bit of a priority list of things I know I’m going to need to address – but again with the doan wanna, so I just dove straight into the scene-by-scene analysis that is going to be the backbone of my editing process this time.

(I’m using Holly Lisle’s How To Revise Your Novel course for this one again, since it’s such a big book; the Holly process is IN-FREAKING-TENSE, but it is also COMPREHENSIVE and I am *here* for only having to do ONE pass of revision on this beast.)

I had a minor moment of panic when I was looking at some of the early chapters going, 1) I love this chapter and I know it fundamentally WORKS, but 2) I can’t actually articulate what the CONFLICT is, AHHHHHHHHHHHH, but I think that’s just me being out of practice, and needing to stretch my brain to remember the different ways that conflict actually works beyond just “x person vs. y person”, which is a very low-level obvious conflict and absolutely does not need to occur in every scene for there to *be* conflict.

E.g. the scene I ended on last night, the main character Kyla wakes up in a stranger’s house and spends the scene trying to assess if the stranger is *safe to be around*. The stranger isn’t actually doing anything antagonistic per se, but the very fact of them *being a stranger* creates conflict, because there’s this potential danger for Kyla – especially since she’s been degloved, which means her magic is exposed. So this is a scene of ‘potential conflict’ a la ‘potential energy’, which absolutely counts; I just had to get back into the right mental groove to remind myself of this, and not to panic when I couldn’t immediately identify a conflict in a scene that OH NO THE BOOK IS MORE BROKEN THAN I THOUGHT.

(Actually, after my read through the other month, the book is LESS broken than I thought, which is great. Approximately the middle half of the book will be fine pretty much as it is, hurrah.)

So anyway, that’s my random musing for the day. Edits, yay! Progressing on things which are scary but which I really want to do, yay! Remembering that it’s okay to take a hot minute to get back into the groove of things, yay!

All sorts of yays.

I hope you find some yays in your day too πŸ™‚ <3


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