I actually enjoy doing revisions more than doing the first draft—it’s less work!  I’m a planner, which means I try to work out as much of the plot in advance as I can rather than waiting for inspiration to strike (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t—I find my muse takes vacations at the least appropriate times). But when it comes to slogging through the actual writing, it’s torture! A very wise member of my local RWA chapter once said, “Write three pages a day—anybody can write three pages.” That’s good advice and it usually works, but there are days when I’m pretty sure those three pages are total crap. In fact, there are days when I find myself really wanting to just trash the whole thing. I don’t because if I did, I have a feeling I’d never get it started again. Which brings us to National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo. I’ve never done this, but I think it’s a great idea. If there’s one thing I’ve learned while churning stuff out, it’s that misery loves company. Taking part in workshops that require you to post stuff is one way of doing this, but NaNoWriMo is a bigger way. Thousands of people suffering together—what more do you need? And if you persevere, you’ll have 50,000 words by the end of the month. You may or may not do anything with those 50,000 words, but the important thing will be that you’ve proven to yourself that you can actually produce this much stuff in a relatively brief period. And you know what? A lot of times when I go back later to review what I’ve written, it turns out that the crappy pages really weren’t all that bad. They’re usually rough, and I usually spend a fair amount of time polishing them, but as I say, revision is a lot less work than writing!