How To Revise Your Novel

For my first ever NaNo, in 2008, I wrote a novel about space pirates called Stars Shine Brighter. I had amazing characters and great ideas and concepts when I started out and, as it so often happens, the magic didn't translate onto what I'd written. Now, even though the first draft is a mess, I've still been in love with the characters ever since, figuring out more and more about them and their personalities and trying to write more. From these attempts, more snippets of text were born, but no significant progress was made.

So I decided to do something that had been tempting me for a while and sign up for Holly Lisle's novel revision course, the appropriately named 'How To Revise Your Novel'. I feel like HTRYN is going to be a good thing for me, because it structures things in a way that I quite like. How much vaguer could I be, huh? Information on the course can be found here at http://howtoreviseyournovel.com/. Now, I know the page looks corny and all, but I've read some of Holly Lisle's previous essays and fiction [and blogged about it] and I really do like her style and what she has to say. I'm just a sucker for anything structured like a class.

So right now I'm fighting my way through Week One of the course, which Lisle defines as the hardest one, because you have to set yourself a whole new bunch of targets, which you do by reading your manuscript and writing down every time you think something sucks. Which I my case happens often. Updates on this will follow as I work through the course.

My goal for the coming week is to finish Week One and start on Week Two after that.

Oh, lookie, it's mid-May!

April has come and gone in a whirl of script-writing, event-organising and mild swearing. I have tried to be a good ML and I think on some level I achieved that, although motivation strongly lagged after I started finding myself alone at write-ins. Script Frenzy was pretty cool, but it's not as popular as NaNoWriMo and its participants tend to be more of the online type, I think. If only because the fact that there even were MLs for London this year wasn't so widely known.

I'm proud to say that I have won Script Frenzy, with the 100-page mark reached on Friday the 30th around 9pm. I swear one year I'll win before the late evening on the last day. I wrote an adaptation of a romance novel I'd started for JulNoWriMo last year and it went pretty well. It's actually the closest I've come yet to finishing any story, but it's not finished yet, of course. The young padawan, much learning yet to process has. I also had fun with the format although it was a bit difficult to get to grips with it at first. I'm sure I went a bit OTT on visual gimmicks, montages and symbolic things, but I feel like I learnt at least a bit. So that was good.

Now, tell me about your month of April, people. Did you try your hand at Script Frenzy? If so, did you like it or not? Did you find script-writing to be just the thing for you? Or just the thing to avoid? Will you be taking part again next year? Will you give it a try if you haven't yet?