Revision burn-out

One of my Goals for 2011 (which I haven't really specified in my Goals list, actually...guess I should rectify that!) is to get through latest edit of SUNDOWN and chop the word count. I've been keeping track of my revisions for a while in this blog, and you can see the entries that made reference to them here. But to summarise, my first draft (as opposed to the rough draft I had at the end of NaNo' 2009) was 147k, and right now I'm at 108k. This is good, but I still have work to do.

Everything was going pretty smoothly. I removed entire chapters, which was a very good start. Then I kept finding whole chunks (or even just a paragraph or sentence here and there) to cut. I was feeling good, even though I knew I had a lot of work to do in future - there were certain scenes I wasn't satisfied with, and I knew early on I would be rewriting them eventually. But instead of keeping going with what I had been doing - the slow and steady stripping of glaringly unnecessary words/sentences/paragraphs - I decided last week sometime that I was ready to dive right into the rewriting part. Cue the slight problem I mentioned recently, and a whole lot of chaos.

Currently I feel like I'm in a revision slump, the kind where staring at the wall seems like it's going to be more productive than actually trying to revise anything. Maybe I've tried to do too many things at once? Let's list the things I've been doing, shall we?

• Working on opening chapters, which have been stripped back so far that they are now lacking a bit of necessary meat
• Removing entire chunks out of the middle of the novel, and working on filling the resultant holes
• Working new stuff into the novel either in the beginning or in the middle or somewhere else, and then having to work that new stuff in right throughout the novel, because otherwise it just suddenly appears (or disappears) with no explanation
• Throwing out all sorts of stuff with those opening/middle chapters which now has loose-end references elsewhere in the manuscript; loose ends that must be tied up again!

In short, I think what I've got here is a bit or revision burnout!

Tempting though it is to just forget this WIP for the time being and fixate on something else, I'd really rather keep going with this one and get it ready for some beta attention. It is my dream to have at least one piece of work ready for that. But this novel is the closest to it, and it's still so very far off!

P.S. I put a little Spotlight...errr, spot...in the top right-hand corner of my blog (below the page tabs), and in there right now is this entry from Anny Cook titled Potato Love. If you haven't seen it yet, you should - it is extremely cute. :)