One of the biggest things I'm grousing about lately is the <sarcasm on> joy <sarcasm off> of trying to find an editing "process" that works for me. It's a very frustrating thing to be going through.

I ask other authors how they keep track of what needs to go where in the edit. They tell me. I try it, and it doesn't work for me. I wander the web and try things. Try this, try that. Discard this, discard that. Aaarrggghhhh! It's so time consuming.

But I think I finally figured it out.

A big white board, and a whole slew of little sticky notes.

I finally figured out that the problem with the flowchart program, that I thought was going to work so well, was that I couldn't see the whole thing at one time. With the white board, I can see the whole thing at once, and I really think I've hit on what works for me. We'll see if it still works as the editing progresses, but so far, so good.

The yellow notes running down the left side are the numbered scenes. The bright orange in the bottom-middle is the plot that needs to be stuffed into the book. All the rest are bits and pieces, in vertical order, that need to get put into one scene or another.

First I went through all my notes and research book, looking for things that needed to be put into the story. Then I went through the manuscript itself, looking for things that needed to be foreshadowed or drawn out. Like the heroine has a complete emotional meltdown in scene 6, completely out of the blue. Before that point, she never once mentions this huge emotional burden she has the meltdown over. Oops! Okay, three or four sticky notes for that. :-) And scene 22 mentions something that has a whole huge long backstory that should have been hinted at long before... more sticky notes.

The picture is my progress as of last night, with everything accounted for that I'm going to worry about.

Today I started arranging the sticky notes onto the lines for the appropriate scenes, and discovered a very valuable by-product of this process... I'm about 1/2 way through the sticky notes, and two scenes don't have even one note on them. Oops! Okay, time to look at those scenes and decide why they're there, and if they're necessary. Because if they are necessary, then it's time to get some sticky notes onto them, so something actually happens in those scenes. And if they aren't necessary, now's the time to junk the scenes. Decisions, decisions.

The orange ones are going to be the hardest to but into the right row (scene), because that's the stuff that doesn't exist in the draft. I worked with the orange ones some today, and decided that it wasn't going to be as quick as I'd hoped. I'll have to go through each scene of the draft and see what plays into what part of the plot... going to take some time.

But at least I'm moving, and I have a good handle on what needs to be done next. Which is all a vast improvement from how the book was going last week.

Besides, it looks cool! :-)