Monday, March 18, 2013

One and (not) done

I finished the first major revision of my novel last night. This morning I immediately jumped back in and began cleaning things up. Little things like making sure that I'm following the rules for eventual manuscript submission, and big things, like making sure that I'm not using a dozen words to say what should only take five.

It's been an interesting transition, coming from a place where the constant upward motion of my word count was a point of glee. Now the opposite occurs - as my word count falls from 66- to 65- to 64- to 63-thousand words, I feel that same glee knowing that I'm making the remaining words stronger. I'm forcing myself to send the draft over to beta readers without doing a third run-through, because like many beginning authors, I can probably go through and re-edit until I wheeze out my last breath.

That got depressing.

Lest I be concerned about leaving this world behind, as I go through on this second revision and figure out exactly what my characters are supposed to be doing and saying, the sequel is already developing in my head. Which is great, because I'm not ready to say goodbye Elleigh, Zee, and Officer Ray just yet. Oh no, we need another 60k words together, at least.

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