Revison

Since my revision attempts at the novel crashed, I picked up an old first draft of a short story (a 54 page "short" story) to try to practice my revising muscles on. I ended up with a pretty nice second draft that I let Beth read. She pegged the things that were wrong with it (things about character motivation that I'd suspected all along). But after some initial frustration, we also discussed what was right with the story. And now I'm seeing ways of making a third draft that could work really well--not to mention bringing the thing down to a reasonable size; the second draft was still 39 pages long. So all is not lost. There are things I like very much about this story. It's worth trying to save.