If this is anything like the revisions for Bones and Secret (but then, every book has a way of being its own thing), the process from there might go something like this:
– Read the letter
– Resist at least one large-scale thing — “I can’t possibly do that!” “The story would fall apart!” “Or even if it wouldn’t, I don’t know how to do that!”
– Pace and fret
– Sit down and enter all the notes, in the letter and on the hardcopy, into the manuscript, putting them in brackets so I know they’re notes
– Make the most minor changes, spelling and word choice and other trivialities, because those are easy, and because I might as well get them out of the way
– Wander restlessly through the manuscript, making mid-scale changes out of order
– While doing all of the above, make notes on the large-scale issues
– While making notes on the large-scale issues, begin, at last, to see that of course I can tackle them
– Dig in, tear things apart, change the big stuff
– Check to make sure all the brackets have gone away
– Fret because in tearing things apart, my once-polished prose is once again an unruly mess
– Re-polish the edited book back into ruly-ness
– Lather, rinse, repeat
For all the fretting (but then, fretting seems a normal part of every stage of my process :-)), I love revision and the ways in which we can dig in and make the story better.
In the meantime, this morning is for clearing the decks of various non-revision related things!