So, I’ve started to revise my novel.  As I’ve mentioned before, I wrote it as part of NaNoWriMo in 2004 but hadn’t even read it until recently.

So, good news and bad news.  It is much better than I thought.  Enough time has passed since I wrote it that I was actually surprised by parts of it.  Some of the plots twists are clever.  The mystery itself isn’t bad and the plot generally holds together as the mystery is solved.

It is filled with typos and “(insert more words here)” or “(blah)” where I didn’t have time to research something.  The typos are easy enough to fix, though it is more time consuming than I thought.  I’m done correcting twelve of sixteen chapters.  I haven’t filled in the (insert more words here) sections yet, though the day is coming.   Lots of the characterization sections are extremely dated- they mention tv shows and celebrities who are long gone.  They can probably be updated to more modern references or the characterization scenes can be re-written to be more timeless.

Parts of it are cringe-worthy though.  Me ten years ago was a much more naive person and that is reflected in the text.  At the time, I’m pretty sure I intended this to be a wildly feminist book, but reading it now, I see I reinforced a million sexist tropes.  In general, the way people interact with each other is superficial.  The interactions between the characters lack depth.

I think there is enough good stuff here that it is worth fixing up the larger problems.  But there is much more work to do than I had guessed at first.  I thought I’d read it, fix typos, write a few small scenes, do some light editing and then work on figuring out the publishing part.  What actually needs to be done is deconstructing the entire text into individual scenes, reworking each one or deleting them, and then reconstructing the whole thing as a novel.  And then figure out publishing.

I’m also writing the book in Scrivener.  I haven’t used this program much before and what I had done previously was mostly using it as a text editor.  The program is designed specifically for complicated writing projects such as writing a novel.  But there is a steep learning curve for the advanced features.  And the text is just hard to read in Scrivener.  It ends up all crunched up and tiny, no matter how I have the font set up.  I’m not really sure why this is the case.  But the ability to store information/ metadata about each scene (like point of view and location) or the ability to have sections of research (like character profiles) makes me think that once I figure everything out my life will get much simpler.

My goal for this week is to correct all the typos and grammatical errors.  I’m also deconstructing each chapter into scenes as I’m correcting the grammar.  I want to start filling in the metadata for each scene.  However, since Scrivener is pretty flexible, I need to decide what metadata I want to include.  Once that is done, I can check the pacing.  I’m pretty sure the pacing is a mess.  Fifty thousand words is much shorter than a typical novel, so things feel rushed.  But at the same time, the pressure of writing fifty thousand words in a month means that there is a ton of padding.   Being concise does not make one a NaNoWriMo winner!