Revising, too . . .

Okay, so it's another post about revisions, but Katie and I are both knee deep into them. Since it's November and NaNoWriMo, I have decided to follow The Intern's lead and commit to NaNoReVisMo. The last thing I need to do is start another novel when I've got three of them sitting here begging me for heavy duty revisions . . . not to mention my picture book.

Anyone else in??

Katie's last post referenced a great revision post by Stephanie Perkins. I just read one by Elana Johnson on querytracker that is every bit as helpful. My favorite thing she says to do is "chunk" your manuscript. By this, she does not mean for us to "chunk" our babies into the recycle bin to be turned into newsprint and cereal boxes. No, she suggests that we divide our manuscript up into "chunks" and work on them that way. Great stuff--be sure to read her entire post here!

So here's where I've been all week.

Working on my picture book revisions. Again. Yes. Again. I've changed the ending and a few things at the beginning of the story. This, of course, means that my sketches have to be redone. Again.

I'm not complaining. It keeps getting better with each revision.

I've got my thumbnails on index cards so that I can look at the entire book in one glance and see where pictures need to be changed for variety in pacing or general flow of the story.

And, yes. That is my Tim Gunn bobblehead lording over my revisions. He says things like "Make it work" and "I can't want you to succeed more than you do". He just may be the force to push me through this.

A few more days of sketches and then it's off to novel revisions. See you on the other side.

sf

So, I'm revising...

People say to me everyday, "Hey Katie! What's up?" And I know they're bored when I say, "Still revising."

But seriously. It's all I do. I wake up, drink coffee and walk up to my husband's office where I revise. End of story.

I will say, though, it's gotten fun. It was tearful there for a while. I don't know about y'all, but changing the entire storyline of my book was terrifying initially. People told me that changing plot is much easier than changing character or something else, but I whole heartedly disagree. Changing plot is like someone telling me, "You know how SF lives in Mississippi and is married to John and has 3 girls? Well, we want you to make her a lesbian accountant living in NY with 2 dogs."

Also, revising has given me the sad side effect of blog block. Yep, I can barely read them, much less write one. The only entertainment I take in during the week is Modern Family (which was FRIGGIN' hilarious last night!!!!!!!) and GLEE :-)

Beyond that it's words, words and more words.

BUT, I did read a post from one of my favorite bloggers, Stephanie Perkins and it was wonderful, especially for those of you who are revising, so I will link to it here. Do go meet her. She's hysterical. I can't wait for her book. It's one of the few I'm pretty sure I will adore, just by reading her blog.

Peace Out,

Katie

New Website!!

Thirteen years ago, I hired a high school student to design a basic webpage for me with nothing more than a couple of images and some contact information. If people wanted to see my artwork, they could email me and I would send current images. It was enough. Everybody didn't have websites back then, anyway.

A couple of years ago, I decided to join the modern age and create the ultimate website. One of my babysitters had just finished a class in web design . . . so I traded her my kiln to help me design a website (I love a good barter, and the kiln had become a coffee table in my studio). I bought tons of expensive software--plus the software reference books as well as Web Design for Dummies. My babysitter helped me when I had questions and helped me get everything set up, but I really wanted to do this MYSELF. I wanted to know what I was doing so that I could update and switch out images whenever I wanted. Sounds awesome, right?

I wish that I had left my old site up one more day, just so you could see the before and after. Let's just say that my website was pathetic. It was too busy, too slow--oh, and it only looked right on a Mac. MY Mac. On anyone else's computer, nothing lined up correctly, and there was a strange floating lavender box on the right side of the screen. I would sheepishly hand out my business cards at conferences saying, "My website is still kinda under construction, but you can sort of see some images on it. I hope to have a new site up soon . . . "

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the hair-pulling frustration that I experienced every time I tried to change anything (to fix one typo in the text for some reason always resulted in a good eight hours of trying to fix every single page and reload the entire thing). Just thinking about the whole experience is making my heart pound. Breathe, sf. Breathe.

Enter my guardian angels . . .

Thanks to Lisa and Laura who posted about their new fab website that they created in a weekend using a TEMPLATE, I now have a new site. Just in time for conference season. I can't wait to proudly hand out my business cards and say "Check out my website. No really. You can actually look at it. It will load. You can email me. You can see images. I can fix a typo in five minutes. I can upload new images in the time it takes me to reheat a latte."

So . . . pay me a visit at www.sfhardy.com. And, let me know if you see any typos. I can fix them!

sf