revision tagged posts

A lot has happened since I posted last, especially regarding draft 3 of book #3.

Book 3 Draft 3

Shortly after the first of the year I began the process of getting ready to write draft 3 of my third book, working title Guardians. The first step was to read draft 2 from beginning to end to get a sense of the state of the story. And the results were what? Twelve-plus pages of hand-written notes, that’s what.

Step 2 is to go through all of the feedback I’ve gotten from my critique group and consolidate their comments onto one document. How much is that? This much.

It’s hard to see the markings on the ruler but the stack is over six inches high. And since I’m looking at feedback from eight different people, I need to spread out. A lot...

Let’s get this on the table right now: Jim Bell does not write a bad craft-of-writing book. Does NOT.

In one case, however, the title of his book does not match the contents. That case is Revision and Self-Editing for Publication. As K. M. Weiland noted in her 3-star review of this book on Goodreads, there’s little here about revision or self-editing. That’s too bad because what little there is clearly shows that if Bell had focused on those tasks, rather than writing yet another book about writing a decent first draft, he could have done well.

Bell divides the book into two sections: “self-editing” and “revision...