I’ve been too exhausted to post much, again. But luckily, not too exhausted to write. The novel has progressed!<\/p>\n
I decided to do Camp Nanowrimo in April to get revision done more efficiently. I set myself a 30-hour goal – thirty hours of revision during the month. Not much, but I figured it was better to set myself a realistic goal. And, lo and behold, it was an achievable goal – I did a bit more than 30h of revision in April. I got a lot done in those hours, too: my third draft of BoBH is now very close to done. <\/p>\n
It’s far too long – around 125,000 words. I added a lot in revisions, oops… (The original Nanowrimo draft – too short for a novel, a mere skeleton of a book – was around 50k. That’s pretty much where I was a year ago, word count wise.) Anyway, I need to cut around 25k before I can start sending it out. So, draft 4 will involve lots of cutting; I hope to reach that stage soon. <\/p>\n
Scrivener has continued to be amazing for revision. Such a good tool for me. I don’t use nearly all of the cool things the software could do, but it’s working for me. Revision has been less overwhelming because I can organise stuff into smaller, manageable chunks.<\/p>\n
The biggest thing with regard to revision working out has actually been scheduling. Since I started the third draft, I’d mostly been working on revisions in the evening, since evening writing usually works for me. But for revising a novel – turns out, not so much. Apparently I can write zero\/first drafts just fine in the evenings \/ at night, but revision requires a fresh brain not encumbered by decision-making fatigue.<\/p>\n
So, since mid-April, I’ve been getting up a little bit earlier (just a bit, luckily, certainly nowhere near the crack of dawn – I have flexible schedules because of my PhD job) and writing for around an hour each morning. I am really not a morning person, but this approach has been working for me at this stage of BoBH. Once I’ve got past the inital argh of it being morning, my brain is in a more intuitive, alert stage, ideal for coming up with solutions to knotty revision problems. Far better than trying to puzzle out those solutions in the evening after a day’s worth of creative academic work. <\/p>\n
Also, working on the novel a bit before biking to my office for PhD work has actually been great for my PhD as well: my brain is more active after creative writing, so this arrangement has benefited both types of work. I’m immensely grateful that I can arrange my work schedules like this!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been too exhausted to post much, again. But luckily, not too exhausted to write. The novel has progressed! I decided to do Camp Nanowrimo in April to get revision done more efficiently. I set myself a 30-hour goal – thirty hours of revision during the month. Not much, but I figured it was better […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,17,8,10,11],"tags":[9,12],"class_list":["post-927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion","category-nanowrimo","category-novelling","category-personal-babble","category-revision","tag-novels","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}