A Difference of Opinion

So I finally read through all the notes my husband wrote about Butterfly Mask. The thing I'm surprised about most is that when I tried revising Butterfly Mask before, I made this huge list (sort of, it was mostly kept in my head) of all the things I figured I would need to change about the book in order to make it readable for someone else. So I had a ton of notes and things that would need to change, and an outline of where everything would be moved around to. And I think I gave up revising it at the time because all these notes I wrote and all these expectations I had just made the whole process so overwhelming. 

But after reading my husband's notes, I realized that it doesn't have to be as complicated as I thought it would be. Which is good. Especially since now this whole revision thing seems like something I can tackle and it doesn't seem so overwhelming. So hopefully things will work better this time around. Like actually getting the book finished.

And aside from adding more detail, taking out a lot of my main character's rambling narration, and being more specific about what's happening, the only thing I'm keeping from my list of things to be revised is to write a new chapter 1 with a stronger hook that has more action.

Finally Revising Butterfly Mask

After months apart, I'm finally getting around to revising Kitsune/Butterfly Mask. This last fall, my husband read it and wrote almost twenty pages of notes on what he liked, what he didn't like, what didn't make sense, problems with my main character's logic, etc. So with his notes and all the notes I've written at various stages of writing the first draft, I have a lot of notes to go through. Worse, I have to try to make sense of them all. 

I think with his opinion to kind of help keep mine in check (since when I'm trying to fix a problem, some of my ideas can get pretty far out there and can make my work harder than it needs to be), the revision process won't seem so overwhelming this time. Or at least I hope it won't be. And even though he's still in Japan and I'm back in Minnesota, he's still willing to stay up late to help me decipher his notes and mine and offer new suggestions when I get stuck.

Hopefully, I'll get the second and subsequent drafts finished before something else distracts me again.