The long editing process

I figured it was time for another post. I am, thankfully, back into writing. Though not in the creative full chapter writing mode, at least I am working on my book.

I’ve been focusing on my first book. The one that’s ‘finished’. This is a picture of said ‘finished’ book when I printed it out for someone. It was pretty cool seeing it printed out. That’s right. I wrote ALL THAT. Bam.

 

I rewrote the beginning. Again. And then I had a couple people review it, and ended up rewriting it. Again. Then some people went over it and I tweaked and edited and rewrote portions of it. And I think I’m happy with it now. But I’ll have to go back and try to read it with fresh eyes and see how I feel.

I have a writing buddy who recently moved in around the corner from me. We’ve been reading and critiquing each others work, so after I put a hatchet to my first couple chapters and then rebuilt them, I took all of her notes and started reading and editing my entire book, beginning to end. I haven’t done that in a loooong time. And I feel like I got a lot of good work done because of it. Not only was I able to fix problems that she noticed, but I had a list of things that I wanted to fix. I especially tried to eliminate any and all unnecessary words/phrases/paragraphs. In the end, I cut out a couple thousand words and I feel like it’s much cleaner. I fixed some time line discrepancies that were created when I adjusted the timeline last year and I, hopefully, succeeded in bringing the conflict in earlier on to catch the readers attention.

Now that I’ve waded through the entire thing, I think I’m ready to look at the new beginning again and hopefully I’ll be able to give it the thumbs up. From there, I’m going to rewrite my query letter, not only because some details that I included in my original query have changed, but the title has also changed.

“But what about your post about doing the indie author thing?”, you might wonder. Well, that’s certainly still on my radar. But I’d like to try for the real deal at least one more time before I go for that route. And we’ll see what comes of it.