Week Eight: Revision in progress!
Quick update: the revised draft of Week Eight's story is with my editor (girlfriend). Spent a couple hours last night after work making some longhand revisions. I highly recommend this approach: your writing just looks different on paper, making it easier to see the writing as writing rather than as the sacred work you labored over for many weeks.
I also did that thing that several "how to" books recommend you do (and about which, of course, I have gleefully read but never actually tried), which is where you pull out pages and group them by character, or theme, or whatever. In my case, having written this thing over several months, and very quickly at the end, I hadn't actually read the whole story from start to finish. I was afraid that I had repeated a few emotional beats, and wanted to track the protagonist's growth over the course of the story.
So anyway, being able to see what Kyra realized on page 8 and then again on page 10 made the subtraction part of the revision process much easier. (And being able to cross out large swaths of text via fountain pen is very satisfying.) The end result is, I hope, a much more polished draft that reads like an actual short story.
But we'll have to see what my editor says...
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