I’m sitting here in my virtual living room, talking to indie author Jess C Scott, who wrote EyeLeash: A Blog Novel, which I just reviewed a couple weeks ago.

Hi, Jess.

Hello there!

Now, EyeLeash is your first book.

It’s my first published book. I have another two or three that literally “see the light of day” on an annual basis, on average.

Excellent! I’m looking forward to reading a lot more from you in the future.

What inspired you to write EyeLeash?

Not too long ago, Jess C Scott sent me a PDF of her first indie novel EyeLeash: A Blog Novel, to kick off a series of book reviews I’ve wanted to do, of indie and mid-list novels and memoirs.

EyeLeash is the private journal of Jade, a 17-almost-18-year-old girl, who recently graduated from an all-girl high school, wants to lose her virginity with Novan, a boy (now turning into a man) she knew from earlier in her life, and struggles with how she should accomplish that.

This novel is written in an alternative format (as a personal online journal), and it’s risqué for a YA novel (because of all the talk about sex). Surprisingly, the format did not distract me, and the story kept my attention. It became clear to me early on that not only did Novan have an emotional attachment to Jade, but Jade also was whipping herself up into an emotional attachment to Novan, even though they both said there was nothing between them. As the story progressed, Jade descended from confused to disturbed to pitiful. I began to feel sorry for Novan, wanting to tell him just to forget about this girl, because she has to get herself together before she could be a viable partner to any man.

It’s the day after Christmas (or close enough, anyhow). And you know what that means: Everyone breathes a sigh of relief that Uncle Albert is on his way home for another year. No, seriously, it means we all return all the gifts that we didn’t actually want. Except that I didn’t get any of those, or at least none that I’ll return.

We all scaled down the holiday a bunch this year—and will probably even further next year—except for my little niece, who played the social butterfly and chatted everyone’s ear off between laments of “I wish I had more presents.” My sister-in-law and I tried to explain to her that part of the fun of Christmas is seeing our family open their presents, too. I don’t know whether she got it, but I have faith that someday, she will.

I got a couple of books— What else?

Recently, I joked on my personal blog about how (not) to revise your novel, a trying process involving sweat, tears, and numerous trips to the office supply store. And all just so that you can see, in black and white, how crappy a writer you really are.

But seriously, revising a novel is a lot of hard work. And in your first draft, you probably did do a crappy job, because that’s what revision is for, to un-crap-ify it. You’re basically trying to fix everything you goofed on while you were writing your first draft. Melding all those multiple character personalities into one; pruning all those lost plot threads that go nowhere; unifying the story’s theme.

For From the Ashes of Courage, I used Holly Lisle’s one-pass manuscript revision process, exactly as she describes it. I’ve always used a variation of this process, going from first to final draft in one pass (more or less), but this is the first time I’ve done everything she recommends, exactly as she recommends it. I found it workable, and even enjoyable. In particular, her advice to write down the main theme and sub-themes of the story, before you start revising, I found that to be invaluable.

Even though it was fun to work on paper, I don’t think it was really necessary—for me—to print out the manuscript, as she recommends, because I didn’t really make any changes that wouldn’t have been easier right on the computer. This may have something to do with how I write. Unlike Holly, for example, I do not tend to throw in new plot ideas while I’m writing my first draft. I would more likely do that while I’m writing my zero-draft. And because the first draft is a rewrite of the zero-draft, the plot holes that result usually don’t make it into the first draft. Likewise, I didn’t have many scenes that I had to throw away. (There was exactly one, and I know how it got in there in the first place, and it’s now less likely that a similar scene would make it into a future first draft.) Yes, there were lots of plot points, scenes, partial scenes, and so forth that I moved around, recast, and threw away, but they were all in the zero-draft, and I made those changes while I was writing the first draft. That probably made the revision process much less intense than it otherwise would have been.

Even so, I ended up—and I should have done this a long time ago—compiling a revision checklist, all the things that I was checking for. In software-development terms, these are my acceptance tests. These are how I know I’ve done my job correctly, or how I know what’s wrong with my story. If any of these tests fail, it indicates that I need to fix something wrong in the manuscript.

I will no doubt add to this list in the future. For now, here’s my revision checklist:

As a writer, I often get asked, how do you revise a novel? Actually, I don’t get asked that. Someone does often ask me what word he wanted to use, as though I as a writer should have a command of words. (I don’t. But that’s a different post.) Of course, if I knew what word he wanted to use, then he would have already put his his thoughts into words for me, and he would already know what word he wanted to use, all by himself, without me telling him.

But no one ever asks me how to revise a novel. Yet it’s a process every great novelist needs to master. And as I happen to be in the middle of revising my latest upcoming novel, I thought I’d spend a little time today demystifying this essential process for you. Fortunately for all budding authors, revision is as simple as 1-2-3, if you just follow the following steps.

Revising a novel can be an exciting and trying process. Exciting, because you get to see a story you’ve been working on for weeks (or longer) finally taking final form. Revision is also when you finalize the themes in your story, because the characters’ story arcs have reached their final form, and you get to see them told through the story. In my case, I started with a hot list of issues I needed to address throughout the manuscript. But as I began reading, I saw that I had already been addressing them, even from the first chapters.