Revision is underway

Well, I started working on Genesis Earth 2.0 over the weekend.  I’ve got to say, I’m really excited about it!

I’ve gotten a lot of really useful response from my alpha readers and I’ve compiled a master draft with everyone’s comments on it.  I’m reading that now, keeping a list of revisions that I need to make, chapter by chapter, and using that as I rewrite this book.  I’m not usually much for organization, but I really like the way this is set up–opening up that massive document and seeing all those comments across the pages.  It’s really cool!

Of course, I’m not responding to every comment.  When you have all the comments side by side in the same document, you can see where everyone disagreed as well as agreed.  There are comments saying “I really didn’t like how you did such and such” right next to comments that say “I love this section and how it did such and such.” Where everyone had the same negative response, I’ll see that as a problem that I need to fix, but for everything else it comes down to my own judgment call.  That’s how I’m doing things.

I rewrote the first chapter the other day, and I’m really satisfied with it.  It feels really good when you can take something that has problems and fix them, make it better.  That’s why I actually love the revising process.

Oh, and check out the REALLY awesome widget on the sidebar!  It’s something that Drek wrote for me on the fly today.  He’s really awesome–he wrote the speedometer widget that was up there before.  I must admit, it was much more fun playing around with that widget and setting it up than doing my homework.  And don’t worry–I repented for downloading and temporarily installing an ftp client on the public computers to upload the files to my server.  Twice.