Outline finished!

I finally buckled down and did it, and I finished the outline for RoB&F yesterday. I'm using a nifty free program named yWriter to organise my editing notes; I've never used any writing software before and am finding yWriter to be helpful, at least for this project.

I did all the prework for this novel in about an hour. Seriously. The project I'd had lined up for last year's NaNo wasn't working, it was day 5, and I decided to scrap everything and start with a whole new idea. Amazingly, the project worked. But it does mean that I have more work to do in the editing stage.

I also figured out and wrote down the theme, summary, character arc for the main character and a few other important bits, the way Holly Lisle recommends in her One-Pass Revision Workshop. I did it a bit backwards from her - I outlined the book and made editing notes before I figured out the theme. That was largely because after 50,000 words in 30 days (actually, I wrote the last 30,000 words in about 6 days), written without an outline, I needed to get an overview of the work before I could verbalise out what the book was about!

Next I'm going to go through, scene by scene, and make the changes I've noted. After that it'll be time for a read-through and to send it out for others to look at. I meant to only deal with major structural revisions on this pass, but I think I'll end up dealing with all the problems I see right now, and hopefully minimize future passes.

Today I managed to finish the bulk of the pre-work for E&L as well. I can't see anything else I need to figure out before I start writing, at least. I'm going to start writing and see if I get hung up again.