More Editing, Less Writing

So, what I've been up to in recent weeks is working with the last ten years of blog entries and other writings that I've posted in the blog. I dumped it all into a single Word document, and it was nearly 400 pages long!

I got it printed out on heavy paper, and sorted it into rough categories: current happenings, my past, my mental blocks, spiritual matters, poems and songs, general writings, and my responses to others' writings.

I asked Kathy (the leader of Write Now!, a professional "Editorial Strategist") for some guidance, and her first suggestion was to choose the 50% of the pieces that most interest me. Not wanting to undo my sorting efforts, I chose the first three categories as my favorites. However, they included pieces that weren't so fascinating and left out other pieces that were pretty good. So I went back to Kathy with an update. She didn't know I had already done the sorting, and her second suggestion would have been to sort my favorites. So I went back to the rejected categories and pulled in my favorite pieces, and went through the chosen categories and pulled out my less favorite pieces.

I've been doing the sorting and choosing in the paper version, and updating the Word document as I go along. This morning I've been deleting the deselected pieces and copying in the newly chosen ones. Then I don't know what I'll do, but am inclining to want to stick to working with the paper version for the nonce.