The Horrible Glorious Aftermath

I finished the rough draft of my eleventh novel on Thursday. After you finish a rough draft, many books on writing suggest putting it away in a drawer for one to six months without looking at it, the idea being that by locking your story/novel up you'll get a fresh perspective on it that will aid you in the editing process. It sounds like a good idea, except that by doing that it forces a writer who works on a daily basis to A)start another novel immediately, which at the moment is just too horrible to consider B) work on some short stories or something, which also seems horrible at the moment or C) not work at all, which in my case would be a self-destructive madness on par with whistling happily while an earthquake swallowed the world around me.

So I set the book aside for one day yesterday, didn't write anything at all, and today I start the editing process, officially creating the Second Draft. My usual process from here on out is to do a sweep of the book on the computer and a follow-up sweep of a print out of the book, on and on, until I feel it's ready to send to my agent. I like doing the print out edits best-you catch plenty of mistakes when you hold an actual printout of the book in your hands and holding sheets of paper feels nicely mobile after being tied to my computer/home office for so many months (as I dislike writing on a laptop).

Thus, we here at Blogagaard wade into the horrible and glorious aftermath of a newborn book, hoping to come out on the other side with our limited wits intact...