When I started blogging my revision in January, my idea was to keep track of the process so I would be able to reproduce it in the future. Now in my fifth week, I must once again report that I did not complete my specific measurable goal.

Throughout this week when I was considering what I going to write for this blog post, I found that I was having trouble with the middle section of the story (still), I didn’t spend as much time working on it as I should have (again), and that life has just been super busy (shock!). The same issues keep coming up and I was left with the feeling that mentioning them over and over was akin to whining. After some reflection and discussion with people whose opinions I have come to respect, I was able to look at it from a different light.

I realized that this exercise has ended up being about more than just whether I get my revision done for the week. Because I am pushing myself outside of my comfort zone (both with revising a story as well as writing constant blog posts) I am running into a heavy dose of self-doubt.

In the past there were never stakes and there were never deadlines. I was living a small life with my writing, daydreaming about getting published ‘some-day’ without taking the steps needed to get there.

And now I am, and it’s terrifying. It pulls everything that I don’t know and can’t do into the light, leaving me cursing the fact that there are not more hours in the day while making excuses to not sit down and actually work on my writing. The moments where my talent does come through are brief and often overshadowed. I owe a lot to the supportive people I have managed to surround myself with, that keep prodding me with my accomplishments instead of letting me dwell too long in my flaws.

I have no idea how I am going to turn this rough draft into an actual published book. Looking at it from this point I am not within eyesight of my goal. I just have the steps set out in front of me that are leading me in the right direction, and I know that I will never reach my goal it if I give up.

So my specific measurable goal for this next week is to finish up the plot and story revision for the folder I didn’t finish this week and finish the next two. It’s going to require me to dig in hard, but I think I’ll make it.

Note: I was trying to make it a habit to post on Friday evenings, but I’m a little disgusted with how raw the posts I’ve been throwing up look. As such, I am now going to be posting on Saturday afternoon which will give me a night to sleep on the post and come back to it with fresh eyes.

I have reached the part of my rough draft that has the least amount of development. I have it written, in lots of pieces, in random order, and now I just have to fix it.

I realized, when I started on this most recent folder, how underdeveloped this world is. Like I said in my last post, all of my other stories have existed for years. I have worked on them in varying amounts, but mostly what that means is I’ve had a lot of time to develop the worlds outside of the stories, so the worlds feel more real.

For this story, I feel like once I get the plot revision done, I’m going to have to take some serious time to figure out what’s going on in this world outside of what I’ve developed for the immediate story. Just so the world actually feels like a world.

I didn’t get as much work done as I would’ve liked as I went to my writing conference, which ate up my Saturday, and then I ended up reading The Name of the Wind (which I’ll probably review sometime) which ate up more time. Revision is just more time consuming than straight up writing, so while writing words isn’t much of a challenge anymore, putting the words all in order is a bit more difficult.

For now, I have one week scheduled for my ‘Plot and Story’ revision. It doesn’t look like I’m going to finish the story in that week. This folder and the next two are certainly the roughest. The last two should be pretty easy, so I might only need one extra week after this coming week.

Last week I didn’t give myself a goal that has specific measurable results. Since that is important for judging whether I succeeded or failed at my goal, this week I am setting a specific measurable goal. My goal is to finish writing out the plot and story of the next two folders in my list.

So, week three. I feel a lot better about my progress this week. I got a lot done and I even wrote a completely new scene that I am super happy with.

That being said, I’m not where I was ‘planning’ to be. I’m in the last scene of the fifth folder (out of 11) after three weeks. Fairly positive that I’m going to have to push back my timeline, but then that’s the point of this whole process isn’t it? To figure out what’s going to work for me. Five weeks to revise plot and story might not be enough.

I remain hopeful that this will be most of the heavy lifting. I am filling in holes, smoothing it out some, and leaving some to be smoothed out later. I keep picturing it as a lump of dough I am rolling out flat, and I keep having to pull out chunks and then put in other chunks which then need to be rolled down into those places and will eventually fit in seamlessly. Right now the dough is still really lumpy.

The next folder contains the halfway point and is one of my favorite scenes, so I am looking forward to finishing this folder, and moving onto that one. Yay romance! Oops …spoilers.

I have had an ‘AhHA Moment’, as Gabriela likes to call them. My main character. Tabitha started out a lot like me, because …well I’m me, and so that’s what I’m familiar with, and as I’ve been doing this revision I’ve been able to feel her shoving me away and telling me exactly who she is in the space of this story. While I am a very quiet, non-aggressive, go with the flow sort of person, she kept having these scenes where she would ignore the advice of others, go out and act on assumptions, or order people around on her own whims. I think because of the highly sped up timeline of creating and revising this story, it has allowed me to actually feel the character developing, as opposed to my older stories where I have worked on them over years, and the characters developed gradually.

It is a brand new experience as a writer, and it’s super exciting for me, because I keep wanting to see what she’ll do next.

So this week was a little weak. I did a lot of work over the weekend, almost five hours, but I didn’t make as much progress as I would have liked. *Then* some personal stuff came up and I ended up not doing much of anything the rest of the week.

In addition to that I’ve been struggling with my inner critic saying: ‘Do you actually think this is good enough to be published one day?’ I would like to think what I write will be good enough to publish some day, and yet it’s hard to convince myself of that.

At the same time, I refuse to let myself give up. I love this story AND I have a wonderful goal waiting for me at the end of this revision and I am not about to let that get away. I feel crappy for having ‘wasted’ a week, but I’m not going to stress myself out by trying to get two weeks worth of revising done in one week. I’ll just push forward again.

Okay, so first week of revision done! I worked about 9 hours over this week, which all things considered is pretty good. I wasn’t always as efficient during that time as I’d like. I just have to work on not losing focus.

I’m not as far through the story as I planned, but I’m not too far behind. I did a lot of writing; new writing to fill in the holes. In the past that’s something that bothered me. I had this foundation-less expectation that revising was just like…fixing grammar and word choice or something. Now I know writing and rewriting are a part of revision, so I feel much more positive about that.

I think the biggest ah ha! moment I had is the feeling I get ingoing through and revising just the plot and/or story. In the past I would try and revise and get a section perfect before moving on, which bogged me down. If I got to a point that was really sticky everything would just grind to a halt and I would have to just ‘give up’ on that section which left me with a negative feeling about it, plus the fact that the section wasn’t done.

In this revision I feel like I’m actually accomplishing something even though the sections I’ve ‘finished’ aren’t perfect yet. They have all the plot elements I need inserted. So I feel a sense of accomplishment for what I have done, and it was much easier because I didn’t try and do everything.

I do have a little bit of a pacing problem in two places, where the scenes just ended up super short but I haven’t figured out how to so things differently that they’ll flow better. Not worried about that.

I’m also happy with what’s coming out after this pass of revision. The new stuff I’ve written really fits in well and I hope enhances the story.