First Writing Conference - Argh!

Well, here goes. I'm currently sitting on the train heading to York, going to my first ever writing conference, the Festival of Writing. I think I'll be fine when I get there, but at the moment I'm mainly trying not to think about it! I'm definitely excited, but I'm also pretty nervous. It's an amazing opportunity to meet some fantastic people in the UK writing world and get some helpful input, and I'll try to post some kind of report soon after I get back.

But that's all to come. For the next hour and a half, I'm just aiming to get some revising done. This revision is taking much longer than I'd hoped, for a number of reasons - my routines have been entirely shot to pieces lately, so time hasn't been on my side, but my process is also proving difficult.

For some reason, I'm finding that this time around - perhaps because the revisions and rewrites are just so extensive - I'm having to do a few scenes on paper and then type them up and slot them into place. Last time I was revising I did the whole thing on paper first - I marked up my existing scenes and wrote in new ones, but nothing got typed up until I'd worked through the whole manuscript. This new process is helpful, since it's giving me a much better grasp of how the whole thing fits together, but it does feel much slower and as if I'm stopping and starting a lot.

Still, I'm getting through it, although I'm itching to get this draft done so I can start playing with my new shiny plot idea. All I've let myself do is write down a couple of sentences on what the story's about, and I really just want to get on and start discovering the rest. (Ideally, I'd be doing the discovery along with the Lucy March/Lani Diane Rich workshop over at Storywonk, but unfotunately my budget needs time to recover from the Festival!)

Well, that's where I am. And since I'm now fifteen minutes further into my journey, my manuscript is now screaming for attention.

Have a great weekend!