REVISION
BLUES
by Carol J. Stephenson
When I received a four-page revision letter from a Silhouette editor on
NORA'S PRIDE, the first thing I did was take a deep breath and contacted
the editor directly about an item I didn't understand. If you've never
called an editor, be prepared as I was patched straight through to the
editor. Surviving that call, the second thing I did was to sit down and
tag with red flags those pages for which the editor had suggested specific
changes.
While
those comments had seemed to be lengthy in the letter,
after I tagged them, I could see these changes were neither numerous nor
extensive.
Then I rolled my eyes because the next item in the editor's
letter
was major: the editor wanted me to delete/streamline scenes in which the
hero/heroine were either not together or were together with others
present. She also requested more scenes with only the hero and heroine.
Since my
old scene graph was outdated from previous revisions, the time-consuming task
of recharting my book to spot the problem areas/scenes to delete loomed ahead
of me. This was not good as I needed to do a quick turn-around on the
revisions [think 'first book sale' ribbon for the July national conference].
My gaze lit on the packet
of color flags, and a light bulb went off.
I assigned green flags to 'hero/heroine not together', orange for
together but not alone, and yellow for 'ALONE'. It took me less than a
half hour to flip through the manuscript and tagged each scene with the
appropriate color flag.
Voila. I had a clear, colorful visual aid of what the editor
was
talking about. Immediately, I could see areas of concentration of a
particular color and flip to them. Yep, here were two green scenes I could
target for elimination and create yellow scenes in their stead. And oh,
yeah, there were two orange scenes which I could convert into yellow.
Next time you receive a revision letter, try assigning colors to
specific items, and see if this will shortcut the process for you.
Color me happy.
May the muse be with you.
--Carol
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Penns,
the newsletter of the Valley Forge Romance Writers. Permission to
use/reprint with credit granted.
Jennifer Blackwell-Yale editor, Romantic Penns, VFRW