Attempt at Focus
This year has one main writing focus and that is revision. I will be revising my novels one after the other. I will be revising my short stories and my poems. I will find ways to stay motivated during revision. I will explore revision tools, workbooks and worksheets and find what works and doesn’t work for my process along the way.
There will be events like National Poetry Month in April, OctPoWriMo (October Poetry Writing Month) in October and NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November, but other than that, this site is about revision this year.
If you are an author or poet (or both) who would like to share your revision process, or tips and tricks let me know in the comments, or send an email. We can schedule a guest-post or an interview.
The Revision Experience Begins
Planner Pages
I thought I had given up on my planner pages, but then I wanted to start setting up my revision goals. I took a look at the revised pages I made for December 2019 and thought they would work nicely. After some quick revision, I offer what I’ll be using this month. If you are interested in looking back at my planner for writers project, it started back in February of 2019. Just click on the month in the archives (column to the right).
The file is set up to be used in OpenOffice. I decided to leave the deadlines blank this time, so you can focus on the deadlines that most interest you.
Here are the sites I usually look at when I’m researching deadlines:
- Poets & Writers
- Submittable
- The Grinder
- New Pages
- Ralan.com
- The Poetry Kit
- Trish Hopkinson
- Publishing . . . and Other Forms of Insanity
I liked the prompts and the format of these planner pages. I also like the more achievable goal of three submissions a week. I look forward to your feedback on the pages and hope you find them useful.
To start my short story revisions, I chose twenty-one of my short stories and put them in one PDF without titles. My goal is to attempt to read through them on my tablet as if it is someone else’s collection and choose my ten favorites for revision.
I purchased Cat Rambo’s short story revision class and look forward to taking the ten stories I choose through her paces.
I’ll talk more about organization and preparation tomorrow. I wanted to get the planner pages out today, so you can start using them.
Experience Writing 
This will be a year of revision for me also. I have bern working on some short stories I wrote for NaNo three years ago. It seems like there is never an end to editing, but it is where the artistry of writing lives.
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Agreed about the artistry. I think my focus on revision is beginning to pay off. The last short story I revised, I enjoyed the feel of the words in my mouth as I read it out loud. The biggest issue I found in that story were filter words (see, hear, feel, etc.). Once I removed them, the story could flow.
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That sounds exciting. It will be a wonderful year.
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I love this idea. I’ve been in revision mode since March 2020. I look forward to your posts.
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Great! Thank you. We can master and find the joy in revision together.
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