Talk about 'taking a break'

I was saving DAPHNE editing for NaNoEdMo. But guess what happened? I gave into the compulsion to start editing NOW NOW NOW. I'm finding that the parts I haven't really edited seriously for 11 years (yes, I started this novel at the age of 19, which happens to be my protagonist's age too, and only finished it at the beginning of 2009, when I was 28.5 years old. Now can we got on with the blog post?! Cheers.) are kind of easy to edit. Of course, I cut out a whole chunk of Chapter 1, put the polished remains on AW, and got feedback very quickly that made me see how I needed to pretty much rewrite the chapter. Which I since did, and I'm a lot happier with the result. Got to wait on some feedback on that now. But I'm feeling positive.

Still, my whole point was...you know how people say it's good to take a break once you've finished your novel, to catch your breath/gain some perspective/recover? Well, I guess I took a two-year break after completing the novel. But from the vast majority of it, I took a ten-year break! That oughta give me perspective, don't you think?

When I started this story, I didn't know where it was going. That's how I've written most of my stories. No clue how they were going to end. There have been a few exceptions, namely last year's NaNo efforts (SUNDOWN and friends), but for the most part, I've made it up as I went along. So I fully expect Daphne to be a complete mess (not just the character, I already know she's a mess; with that family, who wouldn't be?). But it feels good to already have some idea of what I am going to need to look out for during my edits/rewrites. I think it's really helped me, working on formulating a query letter for Daphne. I've been forced to think about what the real heart of the story is about (guess that's the glory of query letter writing, isn't it?), and I'm going to carry that into the editing process.

Anyway...what's NaNoEdMo gonna do without Daphne?

I'm thinking I'll either go back to Plan A, which was editing FIRE from last year's NaNo series. And that novel sure as heck needs editing (I won't even repeat the word count here, it's so obscene). OR I could look at this year's NaNo story, NAUSICAA. But...I don't know if I'll be ready to face that for a while to come yet.

Oh, and I should mention I did work a bit on writing out more of my travel memoir. But it's hurting my brain. I think my plan there should be to finish transcribing what I can of my actual journals (it's hard to read my handwriting sometimes...not good!), then print it all out, THEN get around to the actual writing out of the memoirs.

I think that's all I feel the urge to say about where my writing/revision is at for now.

I hope everyone's going well with their own revisions/story writing. And happy holidays to anyone who's going AWOL for Christmas/New Year's!

P.S. I also tried to get back to writing STORM, book 5 in last year's NaNo series. But there was no flow. I think my plan there is to re-read from the start, to get back into the feel, before adding any new material. And actually, THAT is a novel that could use a blog post all of its own, so I can discuss the peculiar 'disjointed' feeling I got while writing what I have of it so far. But yeah...some other time maybe I will get around to talking about individual works of mine, when I'm not in the midst of a "AHHH must edit EEEEVERYTHING in sight!" frenzy.