Revisions

So, as you may notice on my sidebar it reads "revisions!" and that's not a joke. :) I estimate that I spent 75% of my writing time working on new material and a good 25% revising or reshifting the focus of a piece. For example, I had a query letter that I targeted for a teen mag for girls. Great, got that out and I'm supposed to wait for 3 months for a reply. Now what? The query is timely, it's an excellent story and I've found at least 10 additional markets for the query. What's a girl to do, you ask? Refocus the query. The initial query I pitched shifted the focus from a teen story to a regional piece for local mags in the girl's state. Then, keep branching out from there are there are no overlapping queries. I have yet to send those queries but you get the idea.

When not working on mag queries, I've shifted my focus to my YA manuscript. Revising that baby is one-thousand percent different than doing a mag article. Obviously it's much longer but there are other things to consider that have nothing to do with journalism. Is the piece original? Fun? Creative? Do I call one character Bill at the begining and 75 pages later call him Ted? That's where the character sheets come in handy. I found some on a great Website and spend way too much time filling in the blanks. I wonder what my character sheet would like like? :)