On novel writing

I spent a good part of this holiday weekend working on revising my novel. It's about a federal agent searching for a missing porn star. I'm about a quarter of the way through the revisions.

This time, I'm doing a few things differently.

a) I found that I kept going back to the beginning to revise, and I also found the prospect of completing a novel daunting, so I broke each part of the novel down into a small section. Most of them are the length of a piece of flash fiction or a short short story. Each one has its own document. This decreases the likelihood you will go back and attempt to revise from the beginning. So far, it's working.

b) Generally, when writing, the head is what gets in the way. Now, when I'm writing, I empty my head and don't think. I let some sort of emptiness or higher connection guide the writing and the revision. This seems to be effective, as you eliminate internal debate, and you allow the unconscious to steer the creative process. The ability to do this is aided by meditation and being a content-generating machine at my day job.

c) The novel will be short. Probably 100 pages. That makes it either a novella, or a noveltini. I made up that last word. The idea is that you read it in one sitting. Because who wants to read more than 100 pages anyway?

I'm also reading U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life? It's about people who make radical changes in their lives. I find it inspiring.