It's Alive! Revising like Dr. Frankenstein

This is how I feel when I'm revising. I hate reading on the computer and I can't edit on the computer. Well, I can--but I really, strongly prefer not to. So for my revisions, I've been line-editing Fumped on a hard copy. Only there have been about a dozen places where I felt like I was going to make such major changes, or add a new scene, or cut so much, that it wasn't working to edit on the page. So I wrote fresh in MS Word, and just made a little note on the page to "insert patch X here" next to all the other chicken scratches. I finished this round of revisions on Sunday night. Yippee Hooray! I was really excited--until I realized that now I have to go back through the WHOLE THING and input all my changes and cut/copy/paste the dozen or so patches I have. Anticlimactic? Yes, slightly. Also a slow process. Oh yeah--the Frankenstein thing. With all the cutting and pasting and editing, I feel like I'm making a Frankenstein monster of a book. I'm sewing all these old and new passages together and hoping that when I'm done, I'll have a story that it seamless and not one that, well, is as pieced-together and weird-looking as Frankenstein (the monster, not the book. I love the book). It's also a little nervewracking to make such substantive changes. Yeah, I understood 100% that some things in Fumped weren't working for me or anyone else, but it was a finished product. Hopefully with all these revisions, I haven't created a monster.

Tweet