A pain in the arse!

Editing, revising, revisions... revising revisions... my least favorite part of writing a novel.  Writing the novel was not so bad.  I cranked out an average of five pages an hour, completing a chapter of 20 pages in a span of four hours.  I wrote maybe eight or sometimes twelve hours a day.  No big deal right?  Now that the manuscript is complete, I've come to find that the work has barely begun!

I don't have a decent workspace.  I write on my futon with a meal tray and the keyboard hanging off of the edge, which contorts my hands and causes me a great deal of discomfort.  I frequently have to take breaks because of this.

My cat, Sam, is spoiled rotten!  He's always trying to curl in my lap.  He will just stare at me with big green eyes until I give in to his demands.

Then, to top it all off, a writer can probably literally rewrite the same sentence over and over again and so it's difficult to not nitpick over the same things.

So, what I like to try and do is do a "once over," or a "quick and dirty" if you will.  I revise the entire novel first looking for grammar and punctuation mistakes.  Then, I go through a second round for style and content.  I have a hard time with this because I have a tendency to want to add MORE and my novel is already a little over 100,000 words, which may seem scary to an agent or publisher (yes I am aware of this).

I'm currently on the fourth chapter and things are going smoothly so far.  One thing I do that helps me a lot is that I keep a notepad open on my computer of all the changes that I plan to make.  I don't implement the changes right away because I want to get a broad scope of things before, just in case some of the changes cancel out others.

Well, back to work!

(Recommended reading: The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White)