Two weeks ago I told you I was on a roll with my Bratislava novel draft; before that I promised to finish this novel to enter it in the Amazon contest soon. Well, it looks like I’m well on track. It’s been finished for a bit now, and I’ve got into the revisions and editing, and although another month or two would be great, I think I can still make it with a pretty decent version of the way I’ve always imagined this novel turning out.

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but better late than never – as part of my revision process I made a checklist of stuff I wanted to do. The list includes these tasks:

• Double-check the timeline. Especially with one of the characters, I got a bit muddled as I wrote as to how long events had taken, and how long he’d been in Bratislava, and whether it all adds up. I have to check this again.
• Do a proper scene listing (sometimes I might have scenes that merge together or should just be cut, etc.) and check that there’s some kind of conflict in each scene. In general, check for sufficient conflict. Maybe between the main characters there should/could be more?
• Make each of the three  voices more consistent. You  might remember I have three main characters, and they each take turns to tell the story, chapter by chapter, all in first person. I’d like the reader to be absolutely clear about who’s “speaking” without having to check the name in the heading of each chapter. One of the characters is distinct and clear, but the other two, I fear, have merged a little. I want to go through and read only all the chapters from one character, and try to fix their “voice” a little, then do the same for the other one.
• Add a bit more poetry. Not in an arrogant way, I hope, but I was sometimes over-focused on getting the plot out, and not doing it so beautifully, and you know I love “beautiful” writing.
• Check the dialogue for redundancies, for dumb tags (“she exclaimed”), for too many tags, for too natural, for not natural enough, for voice, and so on … yes, dialogue concerns me, and there’s a lot in this novel.
• Put some more of the setting into the story. The setting, Bratislava, is an essential part of the story. Way back when, I got a bunch of my photos from Bratislava printed and intended to hang them up where I could see them as I wrote (including the one above – the view from my flat, which actually looks into Austria and Hungary! I always thought that was pretty cool.). I want to dig them out and see what else is important from the setting to add to the novel.
• Check the arcs of the character development for each of the three main characters. I didn’t plot this out beforehand (I’d like to, next time) but I have a hunch that the development is more or less “naturally” there, but I need to take a closer look.