Gonna karate chop these edits into completion!

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To celebrate our 5-year anniversary in a few months, my boyfriend Craig and I are traveling to French Polynesia. Yesterday was a very badass-feeling day of scheduling. Flights booked – kapow! Hotel booked – kapow!

And amidst all that, somehow I ended up with a deadline for completing my book’s revisions. Extra-kapow!

How that happened is Craig mentioned the trip would not only be a great celebration of our anniversary, but also of his venture into self-employment (which is starting around the same time), and my finishing of my book. I reminded him that it’s only the first draft I finished, so by the time we travel several months will have elapsed. Not really a timely celebration.

But then I thought… Ooooh… What if I finish all my revising and rewriting by then? THAT will be cause for celebrating.

I didn’t think I did well with deadlines, but this might be just the kick in the pants I need. I’ve been procrastinating my revisions, picking at only a few easy things, because the hefty stuff is very intimidating. Every time my book looks at me I quickly turn away and whistle and pretend I didn’t see it.

But having this concrete deadline with a very lovely reward might be exactly what I need to stop dithering about. For the past month I’ve been all “I’m not ready, it’s too scary, I’ll edit later, later…” But now I have some good motivation.

It definitely won’t be polished and submission-ready by then. But the fine tuning can come after our trip – my main concern is the bulky work. Adding scenes, the plot fixes… That’s the hard stuff. If I can get that completed, I will feel damn proud of myself.

It’s officially a plan. And I start… today! KAPOW!!

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21 thoughts on “Gonna karate chop these edits into completion!

      • Yeah, I’ve found deadlines helpful when I’m revising. There’s something compelling about writing a first draft – I NEED to finish – and that helps me get it done. But I have to be more creative about finding ways to get myself to revise . . .

        Liked by 1 person

  1. Do it! When it looks at you, stare it down! Ultimately these books are just big scaredy cats. They must be subdued. I’ve been working on my edits too. Nearly there… I must consider setting a deadline…

    Liked by 1 person

  2. I think… not long. I’ve got a few more smallish things to fix and then I’ll do another read through, make sure I didn’t miss anything. Shouldn’t take more than a week. Then, I plan to send it out to round two of beta readers!

    Liked by 1 person

    • Haha if you want the messy version with parts scribbled out and the metaphorical equivalent of bubblegum stuck to its pages, then sure! Right now I’d say it’s worth about… 4 pennies and a paper clip.

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