Sometimes a general has to realize he’s losing a battle before he can devise a strategy that might let him win. These journal entries are my vantage point. They help me objectively see what must be done. The truth can hurt, but at least it gives me a plan with direction.

Yesterday’s experiment was a big success. With a cut and paste into a new document starting at the exact place I was stuck at before, I was able to push out a new set of paragraphs with all the changes I needed.

It’s a daunting process to rewrite scenes that needs major changes. That is, until I get started on it. More often than not it turns out better than before. Still, revisions get harder and harder the further I get. Scenes written two years ago are now so wrong, the task can be more like writing a whole new book than revising.

The old scenes are like homes that were once nice and new and fit neatly into their little neighborhoods, but now they’re dilapidated and depreciate the value of every new property that moves in around them. Some might be missing shingles or have a broken window or two (easy enough to fix with the proper tools), while others have an old, rotting framework that requires a bulldozer, at least. (Napalm might be better.)

The task at hand is pushing through the rest of this section, now that the groundwork has been relaid. A couple of  new scenes have to branch off this scene and a character (who has come and left the story several times now) has to step back in.

By some miracle, I’ve been editing every day since my last post. I seem to have my groove back!—Here’s hoping it sticks around for awhile.

My recent success of revising/editing nineteen pages in the last 48 hours made me feel like I could break away from this project long enough to post another annotation. This time, I speak about the actual title of the book FIVE RINGS and the reasons behind my choice. Read the rest of this entry »

So it turns out books on editing and revising are mostly for speeches, dissertations, and essays.

If there’s a book out there solely on the revision process for a novel, I had trouble finding it. Maybe it’s too narrow a market—maybe too few people actually finish their first novel and then need help revising it?

None-the-less, there’s plenty of online articles to find. And most books on writing have a chapter or two devoted to revision. So I’ve been reading some of those, and I’ve found: Read the rest of this entry »