Reviewing, revising, editing

Yes, the title says its all; I'm going through my manuscript looking for spelling/grammar/punctuation errors, changing a few things to fix some problems with the timeline that I didn't spot when I was storyboarding, adding a handful of new scenes that I think will help the pacing and the flow as well as clarifying some background details, and so on. Some people call this reviewing, some call it revising, some call it editing. You say tom-AY-to, I say tom-AH-to.

It's been a learning process, too; I've found that most of the problems I've come across could have been avoided altogether if I'd reviewed the storyboard after I'd finished it but before actually starting to bash the keyboard. So this has now been noted as an official part of my 'process' - for all future writing projects there will be a review step after storyboarding. I've scratched a handful of notes to point out things to look for during that step.

So far I've gone through about fifteen scenes and the whole book has about ninety, so I'm about a sixth of the way done. That's not so good; at this rate I'm not going to have a second draft for at least a month, and that's too long for my liking.

The problem is that work - the job I'm paid to do, that is, not the work I do with my Writer hat on - has been pretty heavy for the last couple of weeks and that's meant in turn that by the time I get home and we've had dinner it's been too late, and I've been too tired, to concentrate on the manuscript.Talking of a Writer hat, I think what I really need is one of these:

However the panic and rush on that side of the house is now over so for a couple of weeks at least things shouldn't be so heavy. (At this moment the stuff I've been working on is being tested, and there's not much I can do until/unless they come across a problem, which is how I came to have time to fling together a blog post.) Hopefully by the time I write next week's epistle I'll have got a lot further with the editing. I'd really like to have a second draft done before this month's out.