I love revising, too! It's where I feel I'm my most creative. Writing it down - the bones, the roadmap - is very hard, usually. Even if I know exactly what I'm doing or where I'm going, I hate getting it out there that first time. But after I do, I get to go back and really play with it. I may be one of the few writers I know whose revising/editing generally consists of adding, rather than subtracting, because my first draft is so bare bones.

I work in layers, I guess. The first layer (draft) is always the worst, where I wonder why the hell I'm even writing because I suck at it. When I finish a project, I do let it sit - I haven't been under a serious deadline crunch yet - so that's not a problem for me. Gives me time to think things through. Then I fix holes, characterizations that don't work and usually discover something else I need to add, or change. Finally, I print the whole thing out, get out my highlighters and colored post-it strips and polish and fine tune and line edit every single page. Get rid of repetitive words - my personal pet peeves - any form of look, step, press, move, push that I can change to punch up the action. I don't avoid those words entirely, its impossible, I just want to make sure the usage fits and couldn't be changed to make it snappier.

Thanks for the great post. I love reading about how other authors work through the process.