Editing and revisions

I’ve spent three days–really solid days, pretty much working steadily all day long–on edits for A Lonely Magic. So far, I’m finished with the first 15,000 words. Ugh. It makes sense. I wrote it fast, so of course editing will take more time. At the same time, I feel as if I ought to find some compromise solution where I don’t write quite so fast but I write a little better? Fewer vague words and phrases (such as “a little”), fewer of the abstract “think, know, feel,” verbs, and maybe not so many repetitions?

But today at least a huge chunk of my day went to one of those little changes that just ricocheted throughout everything that came after it. It was a good change. I’m still sure of that, even while feeling drained and exhausted by the process. But ouch. I have another 60,000 words to go and I suspect a great many of them are going to be affected by the minor change I made today. So maybe it wasn’t minor. But it was good, I’m going to insist upon that. 🙂

Tomorrow’s goal. Finish editing the first third of ALM. It started out as the first 24K words of the book and has become the first 22K words of the book (go, me!). But I’ve got 7K more to go before I get to start my murky middle second third and that part is where most of my biggest editing jobs will be. I suspect if it takes me four days to finish the first third, it’s going to be at least a week before I make it thought the middle third. And this isn’t final polishing, it’s just first draft editing. I need to finish by April 29th–that’s when the editor is expecting my draft. I’ve got loads of time. It’ll be better by then.

Tomorrow I’m going to write about how knowing that an editor will read the manuscript after me is affecting (or not!) my revisions. But today, my wrists are tired.