OK, So I've now written a couple of November Novels (NoNo, what I'm calling my entries in National Novel Writing Month. It's clear that in the rush to accomplish 50,000 words in a month, the plot suffered a bit, in both cases.

I think both stories are worth the telling, but the few readers they've had kind of went "um, where did that come from?" about various plot elements, character traits, and such.

So, how to edit. I have some ideas of what to do with the second effort, which I wrote last November (2005). The villain needs more sympathetic treatment, more backstory, more why is he there and how does he know what he knows kinds of stuff. The protagonistas need more different voices; real-life readers have told me that they hear my voice whenever one of them opens her mouth to speak.

I've been writing some half-hour and hour-sized vignettes about various of the characters, just to see if any of them have stuff they still need to tell me. I think they're at least mostly consistent with the canon, but it's hard to know.

So I think I need to sit down and read the existing version, right through, making extensive notes. I used a tiddlywiki to keep track of stuff while I was writing, but I find certain details went unrecorded in the rush to finish the actual novel. So that needs filling in, just so I have things written down in one convenient place.

I also kept track of a fictional timeline, so even though the dates of each scene are not recorded in the text itself, they were (at one time) known to me. I think that's all in the tiddlywiki, but I must check that.

I guess what's next is an intensive read-through, as above, and then I'll perhaps be ready to spend an hour a day (or whatever I find time for) writing. Not as intensely as last November, to be sure, but then there's no time pressure for this, except that I'd like to show myself (and others) that I can do this. And, I'm told, there might be other people who'd like to read a story more or less like what I've written.

Advice would be welcome. Random links for google's attention are not.