I'm Back from my Revision Retreat: And How Your Book is like a Big Pizza Pie

Hey Y'all. Happy Wednesday. 

I'm back! Thanks for making Sam feel so welcome on Monday. He's filled in on the blog three times now, and so far he's 3 for 3 on using the word "metrosexy". Because that's the mark of people who are metrosexy- they have to remind you a lot.

I think he's totally metrosexy, in a fluffy, squidgy kind of way. 

As Sam told you, I spent the last two days up in the mountains of Midway, UT, to do some revising. I took the trip because I was getting a little lost in my book - Alice down the rabbit hole kind of lost - so I decided to make a road map of it using post-it notes.

Presenting, your first look at EVERNEATH, post-it style:

On the tour of my book:

If you'll follow me please... The book starts in the upper-left hand corner, and goes down column by column. As you can see the notes are color-coded. 

Blue: Flash Backward

Green: Flash Sideways

Orange: MC (Main Character) eats a slice of Pizza

(Okay, one of these is not the true code)

The thing I like best about this method is that it's a snapshot of the balance and pacing in my book. Yes, my MC eats a lot of pizza.  Especially toward the end. And therein lies the rub (of special tomato sauce):

Readers are bound to get bored of the MC only eating pizza. They'll be all, "Hey! What happened to those cool little blue post-its? And I haven't seen a green one in ages. Flash me somewhere! Beam me up, Snotty!"

Imagine if the pizza delivery guy came, and all the toppings were piled on 3 slices. We'd never stand for it. We demand our toppings to be sprinkled evenly throughout!

Okay, to address the elephant in the room, does anyone have any spare pizza? Seriously. Apparently I'm starving.

With my book made up of post-it notes, it was easy to put all the notes together, shuffle them like a deck of cards, and divvy them out evenly. The book doesn't make sense anymore, but according to the color wheel, it's pleasing to the eyes.

The other thing I discovered while on retreat:

Bottles of Diet Coke are, on average, one or two fingers too big for a single serving. 

Somebody do something. There are people in the world who don't have access to Diet Coke, and here I am wasting two-fingers worth with every serving. 

It's okay, though. I pooled the leftovers, and I'm using it to plant a tree in Brooklyn.

So, what do you think of the book? And how are you NaNoWriMo-ers doing? And is anyone else craving pizza?