W00T, two posts this week. I am on a roll, even if I missed yesterday and therefore can’t do a blog every day in September thing. (I’m off the hook. *phew*)
I spent the past couple days sleeping more than twelve hours a day and feeling extremely listless and not having the mental or physical energy to do anything except watch TV. Even reading was a strain. I wasn’t depressed or anything, or sick, but it felt reminiscent of the time about ten years ago when it turned out I had hypothyroidism. I’ve always regretted taking two freaking years to realize there was a problem and actually doing anything about it, so I was proud of myself for admitting right away, “Hey, that’s not right!” and calling up my endocrinologist. It took less than a five minute conversation on the phone with someone from her office for us to realize the pharmacy was supposed to give me two prescriptions, and they’d only filled one. I thought since it was a custom pharmacy where they mix things up for you that that must have meant both meds I needed were in one pill. I was suspicious, but… I didn’t know. And I felt good on the meds I had, at least up until a few days ago when I totally crashed.
So now I’m back on both T3 and T4 and feeling tons better. I seriously can’t believe how I lived like that for two years back in the day. I can look back all I want and think, “Wow, I know things were tough back in late high school and early college, what with my undiagnosed thyroid problem, but I still should have overcome that somehow and done more with myself!” But, uh, after the past couple days, I’m surprised I managed to go to school at all back then.
Right now would have been horrible timing, too, since like I mentioned last time, I’m studying like mad for the GRE, and I have a writing sample to turn in soon, and my own books to work on, and school coming up.
Dear Chelsea, i love your book, my favorite character is Damien, his thoughts are so funny! I really hope it becomes a movie! Well, i have just finished writing the first draft of my book and i was wondering if you could give me some tips on how to revise and edit, should i get an outside source, are there any things that i should watch out for?
from Missy
Thanks, Missy–I’m glad you liked Damien!
My main revising/editing tips are to find some critique partners–usually other writers who write in your genre. I’m not sure what you mean by outside sources–if you mean paying for editing, I don’t recommend it, but if you mean finding a few people you can trust to give you honest feedback who are also excited about your stories, then go for it.
As for the revising itself, my process usually goes like this:
I read over the book. I make notes about what works and what doesn’t, what I want to change, and how I’m going to do it. If I have other people reading the book, I take their notes into account too. Then I go through the book and make the changes.
My main rule of revising is to figure out what needs changing and then to keep the changes as small and simple as possible. There are times when a significant chunk of the book needs changing, but even discovering that you need to weave a whole new element into the book doesn’t necessarily require anything big. In my experience, you can accomplish most revisions with slight tweaks here and there. There are definitely times when it’s easy to panic that the plot doesn’t work and if I change A, then B, C, and D don’t work and OMG I need to change *them all* and suddenly the whole book has unraveled and I’m not sure what I wrote it for in the first place. Then I look at A and think, “Okay, what’s the smallest change I can make to fix A but not screw up B, C, and D?” And then that’s the change I make.
I hope that makes sense!