It's bright and sunny today, and flowers are blooming--daffodils most especially. The trees have buds on them. There's a wind coming from the south to keep it from getting too hot. I sat in the sun and the breeze for an hour, and took a walk. So lovely.

My friends who are moving to Japan (!!! I am so happy for them.) gave us a ton of food that they can't store or take with them--which is wonderful. Our food budget is our second highest monthly bill, and now we're stalked up on a bunch of things for a while, which is wonderful. I'm so grateful to them, though I feel bad they aren't able to use it themselves.

Also, I'm done grading for the semester, except for the finals, which take a grand total of about an hour to grade, because they're short. :) Hooray.

Also, I stayed up way too late last night reading the last Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants book. Those are amazing reads; very serious looks into teen issues, despite the silliness of the title. I loved these books and I'm sorry there aren't any more, and I'm not really a big sequels person.

Also, I'm done with all my extraneous tasks for a while (only took me two weeks--there were a lot of them piled up) so I can get back to my revision. I'm hoping to have the full revision of the Royal Tongue wrapped up by the end of the week so that I can get back to writing my thesis next week.

Off to work.

I've been telling my students all semester that writing is a process, and that everyone has a different ideal process that will help them produce their best writing with minimum stress. (Not to mention minimal effort. They like that part, and I feel guilty saying it, but it's true. If you understand the way you write, you can use the most effective strategies for you, do less work, and wind up with a better product on top of it.)

Anyway, my process for academic writing is different from my process for creative writing (though my creative writing process is starting to look more and more like my academic writing process with each successive novel. And the more the two processes look alike, the less I have to struggle with the novel writing. Who knew.)

Anyway, when I write an academic paper, I first do preliminary research on my topic. Then I make a rough, four-to-five sentence outline. Then I gather sources and quotes and solidify a final outline (usually several pages long, including all my quotes typed out and my bibliographical information. If I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll finalize my works cited page in this stage too.

At this point, 80% of the work is done, and I haven't written one page. Last, I take my outline and flesh it out into a paper, then do a final edit and turn the thing in.

I would probably do well to add more revision into my process, but at this point, this is where it stands. I always feel nervous after the outline stage, because I've sunk a lot of time into it and I don't have anything resembling a part of a finished product. But this morning I wrote six pages in an hour off my outline. Four pages to go. And what's more, the writing was very low stress, because the ideas were already there for me.

Break's over. Back to writing.

My class spent a class period and a half on revision this week. We talked about amputating things from their drafts that were weighing down their papers and causing the whole thing to die. We talked about elaborating as regenerating flesh onto the bones of their essay. We talked about restructuring their essay as making sure the proper bones were connected to each other, each paragraph following the previous and leading into the next, the ideas flowing and transitioning. We talked about editing at the end and making sure the conventions are correct at the very end, after the other types of revision are done.

My students were really honest with me about their opinions. They don't cut things out of their papers because it makes the papers shorter and therefore more work to reach the page requirement. They only elaborate if their papers are under that page requirement. Their entire revision process is focused around making the paper "long enough" and then dealing with surface revisions.

They're still going to revise this way, of course. But I think now they at least have an idea of what else they could do if they want their papers to be the best they can be...which they don't necessarily.

To show them another perspective on revision, I did some document merge with old drafts of a few of the chapters from my novel. I went back to the ones that I remembered being a pain and a half to revise. The first chapter of Haylee's Journal went through five or six revisions. I don't keep drafts, so I only have the first one and the last one. I merged the documents...and there were a grand total of about twelve words that stayed the same between the drafts. I'd rewritten the hell out of it.

I went to some other chapters that I remembered being bad to revise. Those had about half the chapter different from draft to final...and I don't think those sections were even first draft.

Just to see, I pulled up a few chapters I don't remember making heavy changes to--revisions I don't remember with fear and loathing.

I'd changed about a third of the content even in those chapters.

None of these revisions were what I'd considered to be a complete overhaul on the book. I refuse to do those, because it's easier just to write a new book than it is to do that kind of a revision.

I showed the merge documents to my students, and they about died, particularly when I showed them my "graveyard file", the place where I put all the things I cut out of my novels, when I can't bear to just delete them. The one I showed them was for Haylee's Journal, and it was 20 pages long. One of my students looked at the document on the screen and said "I'm sorry."

I'm really not. I just won an award for that book, so I bet those cuts were good choices. I learned, though, that what feels like a minor revision to me is a major revision to my students. What feels like a minor revision to me is also pretty major in terms of the amount of work involved. I work *hard* when I revise. No wonder I hate it so much. It's not creative. It's grueling.

Knowing this doesn't actually change anything, but the perspective is interesting, none the less.

I was in training all day for teaching. I'm feeling a little less panicky about the job, a little less panicky about scheduling my semester, and a LOT more brain-melted. I have a whole list of things I have to do tonight, and I don't really want to do any of them.