January 12, 2007

To help me order my revisions, I did full book reviews with specific goals.

Draft 0: Premise, Outline, Timeline, Character Worksheets

Write down your thoughts, idas, as well as organize your plot points and get to know your characters.

Draft 1: First/Rough Draft

The first draft is self-explanatory. Just get it down on paper. If you get stuck, write yourself a note, and use the MS Word highlight feature or the note feature to leave notations - questions, problems, etc. Just keep moving forward.

Draft 2: Spell Check, Grammar Check, Proper Name Check

This draft is relatively painless. You run the spell checker and fix some grammar stuff. Note any verb tense issues, as well as repetitive mistakes so you can learn from them. Lastly, check all proper names. I once found I had changed the name of a secondary character halfway through the story! Whoops!

Draft 3: Note Resolution

Go through the whole draft, and address each and every note and question and problem you left behind.

Draft 4: Love Scene Review

Go through and reread and revise your love scenes and any highly charged emotional scene.

Draft 5: Setting Review

Recheck your settings. Have you painted a picture in time and place? Too little? Too much?

Draft 6: Reading Review (Hard Copy Markup)

Put your draft aside for at least a month, and do something else. Then come back and reread the story from start to finish. Mark it up with typoes, questions. Mark when you laugh and are engrossed, and mark when you feel the story is lagging. Once done, transfer your changes from hard copy to your electronic file and address your issues.

Draft 7: Listening Review

Put your draft aside again and do something else. This time, set up the text to speech and listen to your draft. Listen especially for problems with flow, run-on sentences, mistyped words, and overdone speech. Mark it up with typoes, questions. Mark when you laugh and are engrossed, and mark when you feel the story is lagging. Once done, transfer your changes from hard copy to your electronic file and address your issues.

Draft 8: Spell Check & Grammar Check

This draft is relatively painless. You run the spell checker and fix some grammar stuff.