I’m about to begin my revision of Vergence: The Last Rebellion.  As I type this, my 401-page manuscript is printing out, one page at a time.  I have only written 60,000 words, so those of you who have done this before can probably surmise that I am printing this with some pretty wide margins.  1.5 inches all the way around and double spaced, to be precise.

My novel is missing about 20,000 words to be of salable length for a first-time fantasy/science fiction novel. It is missing a major subplot that appeared half-way to two-thirds of the way through writing the first draft.  My love story angle is in shambles, because it’s quite unique and I haven’t quite figured out how to make it work just yet.  The end leaves several threads dangling that I’m not sure I want to tie up in this novel or leave open to resolve in the second.  And the beginning… oh the beginning!  It’s just horrid.  Terrible.  It deserves to be rewritten.  Completely.  But the good thing about my novel?

All of this can be fixed.

The text for this revision is Holly Lisle’s “How to Revise Your Novel” course.  I like to learn from pros.  Since I’m using her trade secrets to revise my novel, I can’t show you the techniques I’m using.  But I can show you the results I’m getting while using them, and I can tell you that after all of this I will be able to competently revise a novel in a single pass.  I know many other writers do several passes.  I will get it down to one and to do that one pass well in my next novel or two.  This leaves more time for writing more books that I can sell.

So I highly suggest you other beginning writers out there check out this course after you see how it’s working for me.  Her How To Think Sideways course has already helped me write a damned good first draft. Even with the problems that it has.  One character, a angelic seraphim named Meisha, would never had existed had I not learned from Holly how to let my logical brain and my muse play together.  And the book would have missed a subplot and been poorer (and shorter) for it.

I know that my friend Abmo generally hates using courses and prefers self-discovery in his writing.  If you are like this, great.  I’m not.  Really, I’m on borrowed time here–I should have started writing years ago–so I need all the help I can get to jumpstart a writing career.  I’m not here to be artistic.  That’s a nice side effect.  I’m here to start a business in which I can be artistic.  Holly is someone who has had much success doing so–sitting comfortably on the mid-list and making a living wage doing it.

This is where I want to be in fifteen years.  I hope for best seller status, but that, quite frankly, is something beyond my control and so far nobody seems to have been able to make any reproducible results.  Not even Stephen King when he wrote as Richard Bachman.

So I set realistic goals.

Starting with the first lesson, I will be reading through my manuscript and pegging these errors down in greater detail.  Just to get a feel for everything.  I’m not sure how long it will take me to read through this thing, but hopefully it won’t take too long.

I will update you at least once per week on what I’ve been doing.  But I may do more frequent, shorter blog posts instead.  We’ll see how much momentum I gain.

I’m interested in hearing what you do to revise.  What’s your process?  How many revisions through the manuscript do you do?  Please comment below.