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Tuesday 20 September 2022

My Revision Plan is Finally Over...

 

Last year, while working on the edit for WALL OF DOLLS, I decided it was time to put a Revision Plan together...

It took me well over a year to complete this goal. I started in April 2021 and finished September 2022.

The plan was long and involved a lot of hard work, but I committed because I believed in the variety of novels I'd cared enough to write in the first place. The first draft word counts varied from 50k to 78k and were mostly written between 2017-2019. There were nine to tackle. Except, that number became ten after I took part in NaNoWriMo 2021 and added another draft to the list. 😳

Still, I pushed on.

I kept myself from drowning in fatigue, and pushed away any overwhelming thoughts, by taking a few weeks off between projects. Sometimes, when my brain needed a longer mental break, I took a month off here and there. It was important to stay on target but I also didn't want to burnout, and risk having to stop the process.

So, filling the creative well was a must.

In the end, I turned three of these first draft novels into novellas, while six remained novel-length, and one was shelved. I hate that my last project turned out to be an abandoned story, but when you consider the total amount of projects I finalised, losing one novel isn't so bad. 🙂

I mean, I did cut a total of 104,423 words!

So, what's the next step for these finished stories? Some I've already started subbing. While others might never find an audience because they're too strange. Or too short. Weird in ways that are hard to market. Like my novella about a young woman who descends into madness using a fairy tale narrative. Or the novella about a teenager who might have fallen in love with an alien... Yeah, there are some peculiar tales in the bunch but I'm excited to have given every one of these ten stories a chance to become complete.

Well, except for the urban legend novel that didn't turn out how I imagined it would. 😬

This is a big personal goal and sometimes, I have to remind myself what a huge achievement this actually is. Just like clutter around the house, story clutter can become a problem if I don't take care of it.

And now, it's all done. *sigh*

It's time for me to take a bit of a breather for the rest of this week, while catching up on some reading. After that, I'll start thinking about my next NaNoWriMo project, and will polish a short story I wrote on my phone. As well as write two other stories that I started earlier this year but never got around to finishing. Not sure if they'll turn out to be short or longer pieces, but I'd like to write them by the end of the year.

That's it for today. I just wanted to end my goal with one final reflection post. 😊


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