Postpartum Revision

Well, so much for posting a diary of my novel revision. As usual, once I picked up Chapter One, I fell into the story and vanished from the universe for two weeks. Well, my corporeal self wandered around looking, I suspect, a bit bewildered and giving people blank stares and slightly off-base replies to attempts at communication. I guess I will always revise this way, immersed in the story, the entire picture plastered to the inside of my skull, utterly incapable of putting any part of it on hold long enough to deal with the real world.

But it does mean that I can realize where a small change will affect other parts of the huge story and immediately go tweak those threads, so I suppose this journey into an internal universe is useful.

Anyway, the revision is done, the plot theads that needed tweaking and tightening are tweaked and tightened, redundancies have been excised, and my very complex and intertwined plot of of betrayal and doublecross on top of betrayal and doublecross should make sense to the reader all the way through. :-)

Whew.

And now, of course, I'm working on the plot for the next book. Not a sequel to this one, but set a few decades farther in the future. I'm at the 'puzzle piece in the drawer' stage now -- tossing interesting ideas into a file with no particular thought as to order and precedence. Later on, I'll dump my drawer of puzzle pieces onto a virtual table and see which ones create a cool picture.

Meanwhile, I have a couple of short stories to finish and send out, so I'd better have at it.