Eek! I'm Falling Behind

About a week ago, I said, "Hey, I can take a 50,000 word first draft and get it to a polished 70,000 word final revision in a month with no problems.  Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award winner is me!"

But a lot can happen in a week, or sometimes, to put it more accurately, not a lot can happen.

I'm not going to whine that I haven't gotten enough done, because I have made a lot of progress this week, but I'm not going to pretend that I'm on schedule.  As I read through the novel, I'm finding more and more problems that I didn't expect.

There are some major plot-holes I didn't catch the first time through.  There are at least two characters that need overhauls.  There are also some little things like characters with names that are too similar to other characters.  Lot's of setting descriptions need to be filled in, otherwise to the reader, my setting will look like it was drawn by my two-year-old son and his box of crayons.

If this was just any other story, I wouldn't mind.  I'd have time to clean it up.  The problem with this one is that the ABNA opens in ten days and closes on March 2, or when 10,000 people have entered.  That means there's a deadline.  A firm deadline, so I've got a lot of work to do.  More work than I thought I did originally.  

I think it's a terrible waste of time, for both the writer and the publisher/reader/editor, to submit a story or novel that isn't ready, so if I can't make some serious headway on this thing, I might not be able to submit it this year.  It's not the end of the world, but I hate missing a goal I set for myself.

So what's the moral here?  I guess it's to be prepared.  If you're just starting on a revision, don't assume that it will be a minor one.  Give yourself plenty of time.  Ideally I would have spent three to six months cleaning up this novel.

Another thing I should mention is this:  When you start a revision, don't assume that everything is A-OK and you just need to read through for grammatical errors.  That's not revisioning; that's editing.

What's even more important than that though, is to not take shortcuts.  Keep your mind open and if you find something wrong in your manuscript, then by God, you've got to fix it.  Otherwise your unpublished manuscript will remain just that--unpublished.