Lots of good things came out of the discussion for "The Stolen Word".

Me analyzing every.single.thing. I'm putting on paper as I'm trying to write it is most decidedly not a good thing.  Please to stop this now, brain.

I don't think JK Rowling has to pick pieces of Play-Doh off her laptop as she revises.  Maybe that's presumptuous of me to assume such a thing, but still.

Have I mentioned that I despise the smell of Play-Doh?  One of the catalogues I got during the holidays had Eau de PlayDoh... an actual perfume!  *flails and runs in cirlces* No, thank you.  But anything that keeps yon child occupied for more than five minutes is my Favorite Thing Evar.  Which means the portable DVD player, the naked Barbies and the jungle Legos are also keepers.

I have the television running in the background as I type... incredibly easy to tune out the noise of America's Next Top Model, but I always pause to look at the results of the photo shoots.  So fascinating what a difference bone structure makes, and how the plainest of girls can look stellar by moving their chin down or twisting their hips a certain way.

Never wanted to be a model, and after watching the contestants shiver through swimming pool shoots and hiss-meow-spit at each other behind the scenes, I am consoled by my choice to eat more dessert.  Chocolate cake.  OM NOM NOM.

Speaking with canarynoir on the phone (which I do, quite a bit, in hour-long intervals... *G*) I mentioned that I don't normally talk about my writing process here on LJ, other than the occasion Ayiiiiiiiie-hair-pulling post. However, one of the best-attended panels I was on at NorwesCon had to do with with "I just sold my first novel, now what?"

It was a Sunday afternoon, and the room was packed. Which says to me, "Hey Lis, people DO want to know what happens."

sarah_prineas is doing an excellent series of posts about the pre-release publicity process, which have been very interesting reading. The members of debut2009 have been discussing various Topics of the Week.

And what have I been doing?  Er... well.  I've had the plague, and I'm revising Book One.  Again.

So here's my contribution to "what happns after."  Back in October of '07, I got my first editorial letter from my made-of-shiny editor Rebecca Davis.  It was long.  VERY long.  It asked a lot of questions.  It made me explore character motivations and clean up a lot of murky areas.  I did things to the best of my then-ability and turned the manuscript in at the end of January.

Just after I got back from NorwesCon, I got Editorial Letter #2.  Now, not many people I know have gotten more than one, and my first inclination was to shriek "I suck!" into a pillow until my voice gave out or the pillow did.  But it inspired a lively exchange of e-mails, and now that I'm tackling Revision the Second (or, Revenge of the Revision, or Book One: Revisioner) I can see How Much Better things will be.  Cleaner, tighter, more focused.  We are discussing things like pace. Using action instead of dialog, when possible (which I've never heard before, but my characters are a bunch of windbags sometimes... they're theater people, after all.)  Varying sentence struction to help flow.

Plus now, when we get to the line-edit stage (sometime in May) I can call that Revisions III, Revise With A Vengeance.  And that is both amusing and all sunilsebastian's fault.  :)