Struggling to Emerge from the Vortex

I know. I've been neglecting my blog. It missed me, I'm sure.

This is the vortex I mentioned a few posts back. Only now, I'm emerging from it slowly, remember that I have bills to pay, laundry to wash, thank you notes to pen, and holiday cookies to bake.

For days, I lay awake at night, imagining the next scene, and now, I lay awake at night, struck by revision ideas. I've even started keeping a notebook by my bed. If I think of something I'm worried about losing, then I'll go so far as to turn on the light and write it down. (If I'm not so worried about losing it, I don't turn on the light and take a chance on not being able to read my own handwriting in the morning.)

It's not my best work. I'm not saying that all of it is bad, but I changed parts of the plot midway without going back to fix what I've written before. Everything needs some revision before I show it even to my closest friends.

Realizing that I had to make a whole manuscript coherent, funny, and meaningful, I started to feel a little overwhelmed.

So, I broke it into steps:

1. Gather all my revision notes and type them up in order of plot chronology (I have nearly 1500 words of notes to myself alone).
2. Tackle one chapter at a time, revising a hard copy and inputting the changes on a new digital copy.
3. Aim for at least two chapters a day.
4. Once Round 1 of revisions are finished, read it all the way through for coherency and consistency.
5. Read competitive titles for comparison.
6. Read the whole thing outloud.

Number 6 is a trick I was told sometime in high school. I never got the chance to test out this great advice, because I wrote all my papers and assignments either late or the study period before it was due - and thus barely had time for Spellcheck.

In college, my hardest class was actually a course on Fairy Tales. We did great things like have a skit every class and make our own magic carpets, but it was also my first class ever where my teacher/professor took off points for unnecessary words and handed back my papers with as much red marks as black ink.

I was furious, at first. I started writing my papers (gasp!) a week early, and I read them aloud to myself several times before the deadline. Then I did some of my best scholarly and creative work, and the course become one of my favorite classes ever.

(I'm sorry to say that I still wrote the rest of my papers a few hours before they were due with coffee and iTunes and my procrastinating friends for company.)

Okay. Off to revise Chapter 1...

Emerging from the Vortex

That's what Louisa May Alcott called it: The writing "vortex" - a time of little food, little sleep, and much much writing.

I did a project on her in eighth grade and made a four-foot tall portrait of her created from a cardboard cut out and colored paper. She wore a yellow dress, and I made her 3D by curling two skinny strips at brown paper at her temples to match the hairstyles of the times. Or rather the hairstyles from the awesome movie.


I remember only a couple things from the actual biography I read. One was that her father was a writer too. The other was that she wrote the first part of Little Women between May and July. That's over 88K in six weeks. Throughout her life, she would enter periods of intense workdom like these, where her writing basically took over her life and wouldn't let her do anything else.

I totally understand that right now.

I think that I've been eating fairly normally, but I don't actually remember... Yikes.

I noticed the insomnia starting a few days after I arrived. I tried to ignore it, pretending that it was just the time change that was bothering my sleep pattern, but my thoughts moved quickly as I tossed and turned. This character will think this but say this; I need to plant this plot thread here; did this emotion come across too strong, ie. hit you over the head like a garbage truck/cliché?

Following the writing progress was easiest. (There's this handy little tool in Word called "Word Count"...) And thus, I'm happy to announce: I have written 20K in the last week. That's right - one week. Just to remind you: I wrote 11K in the month previous.

I'm even happier to announce that this means that just this very evening, I have finished the first draft of the novel I was working on, ie. the manuscript for which I signed a contract less than two weeks ago.

I'm 2K over the approximate word count. If I go by the rule that you should generally cut 10% of your first draft, and if I add a scene that I'm pretty sure I shouldn't have skipped, I'm guess that'll get me right to the target of 30K. :-P

Revisions shall commence next month. I want a few week's distance. It makes it easier to kill all those darlings that Mr. Faulkner once mentioned.

P.S. I thought about waiting until the morning to post this. You know, when I might actually be coherent. I couldn't wait. Excitement abounds!