Edit my NaNoWriMo novel

My “novel” isn’t even a novel. It’s a disorganized mess of scenes that served as inspiration and fuel for what will be the final story. Instead of trying to polish up what I’ve got, I’m creating a chapter-by-chapter outline and starting fresh.

I did trim the fat. I printed the whole thing out and just went through with a pen and crossed out the nonsensical parts (a lot). And by nonsensical, I mean truly meaningless.

I’ve since sent it to a friend to look over after feeling I couldn’t bear dealing with it any longer.

Still waiting for her to get back to me.

I’m finally trying to do this now, after deciding it was more important to edit last year’s nano novel than working on this one. It’s difficult because it’s tedious… so much of what I wrote isn’t good and needs to be either cut or re-written. I just want a half-way decent story so that I can say, “it’s done.” I guess my smaller goal now is to just trim the fat, getting rid of all the parts that aren’t even relevant to the story (a lot) and the parts that are ridiculous.

I got the novel draft printed in paperback from LuLu and an aquaintance at work read it. She said it was a real page turner. It only took her two weeks to get it back to me. So I feel very good. I’ve been editing it off and on. I also won at scriptfrenzy.org so I am now into writing screenplays. This puts the novel on the back burner. I am wishing I could live full time as a writer and I’m looking for more literary formats to try out. I’ve done poetry, essays, blogging, novel, short story (just entered one in a contest), screenplay. Wrote a copule of stage plays when I was much younger. Haven’t tried journalistic writing, unless you count blogging. What else is there?

I was so good when I first finished writing it – I edited 71 pages of my NaNoWriMo novel and then I just stopped. There were a lot of external factors getting in the way of me keeping my full attention on it, but here lately it’s been popping up in my thoughts now and then. I want to be able to share it with people and feel proud of it, but I don’t want to just let folks see the unedited version. I don’t know – someone give me a kick in the butt and tell me it will be worth it to actually edit this thing.

I’m almost done with my first edit on the electronic manuscript. I think I’m up around page 117 out of 220 (that’s double-spaced). So even though I didn’t get done with it as soon as I would have liked – I’m still interested enough in the manuscript to keep on going. Another section should be available for friends to read by this weekend. :)

I did the gross (large) editing and moved a couple of sections around so that it’s sensible enough for someone else to read. A woman at work keeps asking about it. So I’ve uploaded it to Lulu.com and am patiently waiting for the free copy I earned by winning at NaNoWriMo. I still need to tell that woman about the two parts of the book she may not like. If she doesn’t like them enough I’ll have to find someone else to read it. But all in time. All in time.

I had almost forgotten about all the NaNoWriMo pains until I started working hard core this afternoon to finish a huge chunk of editing on my novel. Over the holidays I hand-edited my manuscript and I managed to enter in all those changes onto the word document up to about 71 pages (or at about 18,000 words). I’m actually pleasantly surprised with how well the story flows overall but I’m eager to let my friends start reading it to get some critical feedback.

If anyone is at all interested in reading the first 71 pages of it, please let me know and if there is enough interest, I’ll upload a pdf version of it to my blog for downloading. Otherwise, I’m giving myself a strict deadline to finish the rough edit by January 14. Now, time to go ice my wrist.

I’ve done a read through, and two passes. One to make a card for each scene and a second time to list all the problems. I need to make a time line, it’s a complex time novel. But I need to get things in the right order, at least, before I take advantage of the free printing from Lulu.com. Then I have selected one person to read it and let me know if it’s worth continuing to edit. If yes, then on with editing. If no, I may finish it up anyway. I love the process. I love editing. I’m looking forward to it.

Yay! I have it all printed out and bound together so that I can start reading it. I’m going to do a cold read through first and then once I see it as a whole I can start hacking at it!