I'm in the middle of revision right now. It's going well, especially because I like the story. (It's near-impossible to do this if you don't really care for your own story…) I like drafting too, but sometimes revision can be more “fun” because I can clear away all the gunk that's “almost there” but not quite.

Below you can see my desk during revision mode. It always has lots of highlighters, my drink of choice (it's coffee in the picture because I took it in the morning, but usually it's a big bottle of water at room temperature; I don't like cold water because it sometimes hurts my throat), trusty Synonym Finder, a notebook to jot down any ideas or reminders as I revise, and several pens in different colors. I also use Word Menu (not in the picture), which is a reverse look-up dictionary. And of course a print out of my work-in-progress.

Now a close-up of some pages after I've savaged them. Once I'm satisfied that they've been sufficiently brutalized, I transcribe everything to the soft copy on my computer. That takes a while because…um…sometimes my handwriting's very bad. I try to write neatly as much as possible in normal settings, but when I'm revising, I jot down ideas very fast because I don't want to lose any gems that come to mind.

All of us have written and revised at one point, even if it's not fiction (school essays, personal essays / statements for college apps, etc.). How do you revise?

I will not be blogging until I'm done with All the King's Women revision. Currently I have too many things to do and not enough time.

See you later! :)

I'm still struggling with the ninth chapter from All the King's Women. Nothing's happening!!!!! My h/H brood, brood, brood, eat, brood, brood, brood, brood. I want to delete the entire chapter or just pretend that everything's fine in it, but I know better. Ch. 9 shows the aftermath of my h/H's first love scene. I can do better than having my h/H brood.

Another thing I noticed as I revised — I used different spellings for the same thing. *sigh* Usually they're for words that do not exist in ours. So I made a vocab list in Excel and sorted it alphabetically. I haven't realized this until I put them on the paper (or on my trusty computer screen) but I have fifty-five world-specific terms.

Last night, I finally wrapped up The Last Slayer revision and emailed the entire manuscript to Agent. May threatened to send ninjas after me if I continue to sit on it and tinker with it, so it had to be done.

I'm feeling accomplished since it was the most difficult round of revision I've ever done. But at the same time I think it made the story better. Hope Agent feels the same way as well. (Not about the difficult part, but about the it making the story better part! ;) )

It was one of the hardest things I've done for the project, but I managed to insert a completely new chapter into The Last Slayer without ruining the continuity and so on. It's about 16 pages long, but I spent over four days to write it because I kept going back to add, fix, delete, rewrite, etc. etc.

Two more big chapters to go, another read-through, and I'm done. *whew*