Revision season



Writers have seasons. Often it’s the season of our discontent.
It’s revision and editing season for me—which is nowhere near as much fun as writing season, but more fun than submission season. Submission season is like living in International Falls, Minnesota during winter, only without the certainty that spring will someday arrive.
But it’s been productive, and kept me away from politics on the internet.
I made numerous revisions to Coming Attractions, most suggested by the editor who last rejected the manuscript, and it’s definitely better for it.  I did not make the major revision they suggested. That means I can’t resubmit to them, but I can still chalk it up as kind of a free editorial service. The glass is half full.
Meanwhile, I’d thought I was mostly done with Beowulf: In Harm’s Way, a science fiction story that may, or may not, be space opera. (There are violent disagreements over the definition.) I started out to just check the polished manuscript for mistakes, and discovered it wasn’t so very as polished, after all.
When a writer puts a manuscript away for a while and then comes back to it, all sorts of problems will pop up that were invisible in the heat of the moment. (Summer?) That was the case here, and I spent weeks revising. Now I need to polish and check for mistakes yet again, then give it to someone else who will, no doubt, find still more mistakes.
Then will come … submission season. However, that’s better than promotion season. Sometimes, during promotion season, I feel as if I’m standing in the middle of a quiet residential area in the middle of the night, screaming my lungs off. You want to attract interest, not annoyance.
Well, life is less bland when it’s seasoned.



6 comments:

  1. Rewriting is one of those things that must be done... even if it seems to take forever.

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    1. Absolutely--there's no such thing as a perfect first draft, and personally I don't think there's such a thing as a perfect third draft.

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  2. Everybody hates doing their own promotions. Self-published authors, indie authors and even 99.9% of traditionally-published authors have to do their own promotions. One author told me recently she was giving up after one published novel because she really hates the grunt work involved to sell books. Another said she finds knitting more satisfying than writing because nobody asks her if her knitting has made the bestseller list.

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    1. One of the best writers I know writes only fanfiction, for exactly that reason. But I'm not giving up--in three and a half years I can retire, and I'll need that writing income to make up the difference in my retirement pay!

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  3. I'm re-editing my next anthology. No, you don't want to know how many times the individual stories have been edited. Good luck on the submissions!

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