Under the weather

Today's blog will be short as I am under the weather. Apparently I picked up a bug from one of my drama students last week. 
I hate being sick, but it does force me to slow down which is a good thing.
I have spent 11 days away from my novel. Time enough to go back and start my first revision. But before I change anything I need to plan it out. I have always been a seat of my pants writer. The closest I've ever come to planning was in college, working on a paper for class, I would jot down the important quotes I was going to use on index cards and then number them. As I wrote my paper I would grab an index card, insert the note and continue.
God had me sit down and outline this novel I just completed. There were times I would get stuck and then I would remember: hey, look at the outline, see what comes next.
So as I prepare to revise my novel, the first step is to plan what to do. In teaching you know that when you plan your lesson you start with the end in mind: what do you want the students to learn: i.e. the test, and  build your instruction around it.
For my novel the end result is to have a manuscript ready to submit to agents.
I need plan how I'm going to make improvements to it: Do I need to read up on how to revise a novel? Yes. Do I need to correct the grammatical errors? Yes. Do I need to check for description, dialogue, add scenes, shorten chapters, make sure there is conflict in every chapter? Yes. How about my ending? Is the cliffhanger big enough for me to write two more books in this series as I plan?
All of this cannot be done seat of my pants style.
Each of these has to be planned out.
Time for some more cold Medicine. 
Let the fun begin.