Melissesages

I think I may have made a mistake with the editing process. I spent all my good amateur editors on the first round.

As we know, a month or so ago I finally finished my first draft of The Book. I went to Kinko’s, had five copies made, and sent them, along with a questionaire, out to volunteers - friends of mine who promised to be honest and thorough. To help them with that, I even arranged for me to receive the questionairess anonymously. And now I have them all in, and there’s some really good comments, and it occurred to me- I’m going to have to do this all over again.

I’ve been writing in some form or another for a long time, and I think I have a decent understanding of the writing process - or at least, my optimum writing process. I write for as long as I can, and then I need to go away for awhile. (This is not necessarily a draft, since “as long as I can” may only produce two paragraphs.) I come back to the work, reread what I’ve got so far, make whatever changes I want, and then keep going. Repeat until finished. When I’m sure I’ve got it right, I try to go away for awhile again, and come back and look at it with fresh eyes. If I still like it, then I really am done.

The book, though, is proving to be different. First, in how I wrote it all in the first place: in fits and starts, leaving it for months at a time, and sometimes writing 15 pages in a day. The weird thing is, I did do a lot of rereading as a wrote, which SHOULD mean that the beginning is the best part (like, if the book was 10 pages long, as I was writing page 3 I would reread pages 1 and 2, and as I was writing page nine, I would reread 1-8. Get it?) But I became a better writer while working on this book, and in some ways the end is much better written than the beginning. It’s kind of all over the place, which is not a feeling I’m used to with my writing.

This has made my questionaires extremely helpful, but I’m on new territory here. Already, I’ve completed a “second” draft, which is mostly just copyediting from the first - fixing spelling mistakes and grammar problems, rearranging a few sentences, etc. Now I’m going to start editing for content, and then theoretically I should make new copies and have new people read them. If I can find anyone. But how long do I have to do this? Exactly how much am I going to be spending at Kinkos?

It doesn’t help that part of me has moved on, away from this book. I’ve been kicking around ideas for my next project, and I’m torn between starting the sequel to this project and starting something new, maybe an urban fantasy. On the one hand, I’d really like to start fresh, create new characters and work in a different genre. On the other hand, my character in “Identity Crisis” just had a baby, so I feel like I should be writing about baby-having while it’s all fresh in my mind.

What do you think, blog readers? Start a sequel, or start over?