Novel revisions galore

While I've been letting Water Magic sit for a month, I've been working on a new novel, a young adult science fiction set in a Martian colony. It's been fun and exciting writing new characters and a completely different story, and I'm enjoying the change in genre. But nevertheless when the thirty day quarantine on Water Magic was up last week, I was filled with curiosity, joy, and terror to return to the world and characters of my first novel.

My impressions so far? When I started reading, there was relief. Thank goodness! This isn't as bad as I thought it might be. In fact, a lot of this is really good. I'm a genius! Then I moved on a little bit to a series of chapters I'd written in the very beginning. Ouch. This sucks. I'm a hack! Delete, delete, delete. And it's pretty much gone back and forth between those two voices ever since. The good thing, I think, is that I can recognize when the writing is terrible. Knowing what to delete, rewrite, revise--that's half the battle. The other half is actually replacing it with something good.

My plans are to finish reading the draft, then draw up a revised outline, making notes on all the changes I need to make. Then I'm going to open a new Scrivener document, transfer over whatever text I'm going to keep from the rough draft, and fill in the gaps from there.

I'm curious to know--what are your methods for revising? Do you outline and make notes, or do you keep everything in your head? Do you struggle with what to keep and what to throw? And at what point do you bring in beta readers?

Global Reading Challenge: NERVOUS CONDITIONS by Tsitsi Dangarembga

ISBN: 9780954702335 [UK]

Continent: Africa

Country: Zimbabwe

Title: Nervous Condtions

Author: Tsitsi Dangarembga

First published in: 1988

"The victimisation, I saw, was universal. It didn't depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition... Men took it everywhere with them" (p. 118).

Nervous Conditions is the story of Tambudzai, a young Shona girl trapped in an impoverished life in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1960s. When Tambu's older brother dies, she gains the opportunity to study at the Mission school, where her rich, educated uncle is the principal.

Global Reading Challenge: BELOVED by Toni Morrison

ISBN: 9780099511656 [UK]

Continent: North America

Country: USA

Title: Beloved

Author: Toni Morrison

First published in: 1988

Awards: Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, 1988; Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, 1988

My pick from my home country, the USA, is Toni Morrison's Beloved. A dark tale about an ex-slave who is haunted by the ghost of the baby daughter whose life she ended, Beloved is easily the most powerful novel I've read in recent years.

SONG OF SOLOMON by Toni Morrison

Well, the Internet connection setter-upper men arrived yesterday (a day earlier than scheduled, as I discovered when I opened the door in my Eeyore pajamas and blinked in confusion at their chipper faces), so now I once again have Internet access without the 15 minute trek to my local library (not a moment too soon, as overhearing semi-literate teen boys trying to sign up to online dating sites using the library computers was getting a mite depressing). In short, I'm happy to be back on Blogger and Twitter with the rest of you fine people.

Since it's February, and February is Black History Month (in America and Canada; it's in October in Britain), I've decided to read a couple of books by one of the United States' greatest authors of any color—Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.