I've never done revisions before. Not really.
As a kid, I'm not sure it would've occurred to me to revise what I wrote. As a teen I never finished my first drafts. In college, I absolutely should have been revising. It was in fact part of my creative writing classes to revise. But I didn't. I didn't have a great work ethic by that point and just wanted to be done with whatever the assignment was. I actually actively hated rereading anything I wrote for class, whether it was creative writing or essays, and so I just...wouldn't.
So, this--the first story in the Nerd-Do-Wells series (Imogen & Finn's)--is my first time truly, honestly doing revisions of a completed first draft. Let me just say: woof.
I thought the first draft took a while. Three months to write about 80,000 words on nights and weekends. Considering NaNoWriMo gets people to do that in a single month, this seemed like a sedate pace.
The first draft for the second story in the series (Audrey & Theo's) took about four months and was 90,000 words. And that had me thinking, "Ok, about a year for all four first drafts, then I'll blow through revisions."
Blow through revisions. Ha.
I hadn't planned on revising Imogen & Finn's story just yet. I was just starting Emmie & Brody's (story three) when my sister, who I sent printed out copies of both first drafts, said she was ready to read through one. And I thought, "Well, if she's reading through it, I should be reading through it, too, so we can talk about it." And that then led to the decision, "If I'm reading through it so carefully and talking about it so in depth, then I should just go ahead and revise it."
I can't actually remember when we started but according to Scrivener's Writing History thing, looks like it was probably the end of April, so let's just call it May. Four months into revisions and I'm about a third of the way through the story. In terms of episodes anyhow. In terms of work needing to be done, I have no idea. There's a whole episode towards the end of the first draft where every chapter is just a single line telling myself "write this chapter."
All that said, I don't dislike revisions. It's an enjoyable challenge, one that's different from writing the first draft (I need to actually write some posts about first drafts--this blog is clearly in no order whatsoever). But I definitely had no idea what I was in for when I started.
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