Gentlemen, Start Your Spellchecks...

Computer, note-taking materials, and flash drive?  Check.

Cats asleep, relatives dispersed?  Check.

Worst of the year-starting bug over with?  Check.

No clue what I'm doing, but determined to do it anyway?  Check.

Running out of things to do to procrastinate? Check.

Okay.  It's officially Revision Time.

The monster that came into being during NaNoWriMo 2009 is about to be dismembered, gutted, reassembled, clipped, scrubbed, and polished to within an inch of its life.  How long will it take?  I don't know; I've never successfully edited a second draft before.  But, before 2009, I'd never written a rough draft in under a month before.  As the saying goes, there's a first time for everything. (I wonder who said that first?) Online estimates indicate that a full revision of a 50,000+ word draft will take about a year, unless one devotes every waking minute to the task.  My hope is to have something presentable before next November.  We'll see how that goes...

I already did the initial read-through.  As I suspected, it needs serious help.  The first step is writing down what I have... that I want to keep, at any rate.  Character descriptions, places, world history notes, that sort of thing.  Then, with these notes on hand, I'll start the rewrite proper.  I expect I'll end up doing most of it from scratch, with the first draft serving mostly as inspiration.

Well, I suppose I ought to stop blogging about revisions and actually get started with them.

Away I go...