The Hidden Draft

I won't be showing my first draft of my novel around for a few weeks. I should be upfront about that, since I know a few of my reader friends and possibly even my writing group buddies read this and some are champing at the bit (I've heard your teeth gnashing, you know who you are). Bear with me and I'll explain why.

When I last started a book I found that I had a lot of problems working it because I'd get a lot of comments that, while useful and accurate, were things I didn't want to start really working on until the second round. I got so bogged down in those things that I started revising and never moved forward.

This time around, I'm trying something different. Although my research and world-building are much better this time around, I want to do a process that I used with my thesis and was reminded of after reading some excellent book editing articles. Here's the breakdown of how my process works:

1) First readthrough. This means just that - read the entire novel and write thoughts and comments as I go along. No rewriting, no editing.
2) Light proofing. Fixing the misspellings and obvious grammar booboos.
3) Chronology. Taking a look at each scene and deciding on a timeline/smoothing hte timeline out so it makes sense.
4) Editing. The meat of the project. After all of my thinking about the piece as a whole, I'll rewrite from beginning to end, adding in everything that's been missed out. This is where people's opinions will come into play.
5) Re-Evaluation/Roadmap. After Finishing the first runthrough, I'll be putting all of the information about the world-building I've done into a separate document (for hopeful future sequel use), then re-evaluate where the story is at. And then I repeat steps 1-4 until finally...
6) Polishing. This is basically the steps from above to a lesser degree, with an eye to continuity and theme than other problems, which should be hopefully taken care of by now.

I'm hoping this takes about 9 months. Hey, I can dream...