Thank God for the blogging

As I blogged last, the time has come for me to switch from writing to revising mode.  I've been slogging through the Part 1/Book 1 draft I wrote...and revised, twice, actually...as a result, starting along the path of making it publishable.  And you know what?  It stinks. 

Of course, I've been told that by several of my beta readers, in much nicer words.  There were quite a few wonderful people who ran through the entirety of the draft and were willing to write about all the things they didn't like about it.  Trust me, those literary saints will be mentioned in my Acknowledgements page if I ever get this mess published.  It takes persistence to read through something that is written poorly, and it takes courage to tell your friend that his poop stinks worse than he thinks it does already, and I am proud to say I have many friends with both persistence and courage. 

So yeah...it really does stink.  It's funny, actually.  I enjoyed writing it a lot.  I enjoyed reading it (though I now know that was mostly because I knew what the story was supposed to be).  I enjoyed revising it.  But along the way, I made a LOT of errors.  I said "said" in a lot of different ways--four on the first page alone--instead of just using the word "said."  I mixed up my point of view.  I wrote a horribad Prologue...really, I did.  I mean, it really is just crap, the whole thing.  Was, anyway.

Hopefully, if you've been following this blog as closely as I have, you know now how bad all of that stuff is.  Frankly, writing the blog has provided the education I needed to gain in order to understand, really, what stinks about bad writing and what is good about decent writing.  It's helped me, through the research I've done, come to grips with the enormous task that is telling a story. 

Now, I'm not saying I'm perfect.  Nor am I saying I'm going to knock this one out of the park.  But I do know that what comes out of this revision can't help but be much better than the crap I wrote at first. 

So...back to revisions.  And, as I go along, blogging.  Because blogging is fun.