My British Lit class is reading Pepys tomorrow. I came up with the idea that instead of a final paper, they could write a diary ala Pepys. Before I taught this class I had no idea he wrote the first ever diary. Well, the first one that was saved, found, and published. Also, he wrote at least five drafts of it. He was an obsessive diarist.
I wondered about maybe doing that, just writing about the doings of the day, and lucky for this blog, what I have been doing today (so far) is writing. My favorite thing! As I suspected, I missed my original deadline to get The Paris Notebook polished to perfection for TWRP editor. However, I am taking that in stride instead of beating myself up.
Maybe because I’m making progress and feel that I should be able to send it off completely confident it’s the best draft I can write within the next 7 days. So I miss my original deadline by a week. That’s not too bad considering the pile of classroom prep I have this term. Plus all the exercise I’m determined to keep up with for the sake of my back. Which is better, btw.
I’m also encouraged that Pepys wrote five drafts of a diary. I’ll confess right here, most of the time I do one draft for blog posts. I might change a word or two or add some links, but what you read is pretty much first draft. When I started blogging (in 2002) I thought it was cheating to revise your posts;-)
Of course it is not cheating to revise a novel, but my Aries impatience makes it difficult to revise one project too much. And this project has been around since I started the blog. I’ve lost track of how many revisions its gone through. At least five. Then today I started reading the revised pages and found that quite a few of the 400 plus pages needed a little tweak here or there. Maybe I found 30 or even 40 pages (and I’m only half way through the ms!) had one wrong word or phrase. Silly things like using a word twice twice. (See?)
So now I’m editing the revised pages. After this edit gets put into the computer, I’ll be done. I hope. Because I will have to read it one final time again to make sure it’s perfect and there are no redundant redundancies.
Cynthia Harrison 