Reinventing the wheel

It's happened again and I have no idea how.

Yup, I'm talking about revision panic. The worst thing is, that every time I finish revising something, I swear that next time things will be better.

I will be cool, calm and collected. Oh, and I most definitely, definitely won't take my editor's or agent's one line comment to mean that I need to scrape three chapters and redo them without the X or Y or even the Z. Especially since after spending four days taking out the XYZ I will suddenly remember four chapters further along just why I had them there in the first place and so I will go back and find an original draft to cut and paste them back in, before then realizing that some of the new chapters were actually good so perhaps I should just cut and paste them into the cut and paste.

And so the crazy begins.

Fortunately I'm ending the near of the revision haze and there are only 30 pages to go (okay and about four extra essential scenes that I know my editor didn't ask for but they really help to bring the XYZ to life!). Unfortunately, at this stage I have absolutely no way of knowing if any of it is any good and my only conscious thought is - 'hmmm, where are my children? I'm sure I saw them somewhere in that mess I like to call a lounge room. But was that three days ago or four?'

So that's my lovely revision process, though please viewers, I don't recommend you try it at home unless you are fully supervised by a responsible adult (who will hopefully tell you to run a mile because my way leads to madness!)

In completely other news, in order to help celebrate the release of Tote Bags 'n' Blog's, Serena Robar's new book, 'Giving Up the V', there is a copy up for grabs over at my own blog and all you need to do is head over there and leave a comment. Oh, and if you haven't read any of Serena's books before you are in for such a treat because she rocks (and I totally bet she has a nice orderly revision process as well!)