Story Review and Goals This Week

I'll be doing a bit of business travel for the first half of the week, which presents me with a great opportunity to finish the initial read-through of my story. I figure I'll have a good hour of down-time at the airport going out and back, as well as some time in the evenings, so I should be able to finish by the time I return home.

I might even start going through my notes, and playing with revisions. I have Scrivener loaded on my company laptop, for just such occasions as this (travel and down-time), and Google Drive allows me to keep this version synchronized with the master copy of the story on my personal laptop.

Speaking of Google Drive, I was looking for a G-Drive client for Linux, and simply assumed that Google would offer one along with Windows and Mac. Alas, it was not to be! But, I did find a great third-party Google Drive client for Linux called InSync. They offer a 15-day free trial, which I'm about one week into, plus if you refer others you can extend that trial. In the interests of honesty, the link above is my referral link, which lets anyone download the free trial version and will extend my trial by another 15 days. As I said, I've been using InSync for about a week, and it works flawlessly. As such, I am quite willing to recommend it to others, without reservation. And I will gladly pay for it by the end of my trial, whenever that comes about, so I can continue using it.

Back to my goals for the week: finish the read-through, take a few more notes, and start the revision process. In the medium term, like between now and the end of the year, I plan to finish my first round of revisions. That will entail writing in some scenes that are currently missing, adding new scenes that were never part of the outline but are nevertheless needed, and possibly also removing some scenes, or merging existing scenes, in order to improve the flow of the story. In a nutshell, I'm looking at large-scale revisions for the first pass, the big things that are obviously missing, out of place, or needing to be radically overhauled. After those are complete, I should be able to do a second pass of finer-grained revisions, focusing in on smaller details such as refining my characterizations, background descriptions, and the like. The goal here is to start broad, and then focus more tightly with each additional round of revisions. By the end - however many passes it takes to get there - I should be focused on short phrases, individual word choices, and basic proof-reading.