I’m on vacation this week, but I wanted to update on how my editing on my current WIP is going. When you last tuned in, I had gotten back my developmental edits from fabulous developmental editor Kathryn Craft. After a few hours of despair (“I can’t do this, it’s too hard!”) I buckled down to it and found that it was not as hard as I thought. In fact, it was a challenge that I ended up enjoying!
Put succinctly, my main problem was that some of my scenes were out of focus, not keeping the main underlying idea front and center. Luckily, I was able to keep most of my scenes and just refocus them (explained in more detail in this blog post). I only wrote 2 completely new scenes and a half of another one. The rest were all repurposed with judicious trimming and adding of content. The edits Kathryn suggested helped a great deal–the story really came together.
Working hard, I managed to finish all those edits BEFORE I left for vacation. I’m going to let it sit until I get back, then go through a final polish/tighten edit. With all the cutting, pasting, and adding of words, I only added a new 513 words, but I would like to trim the whole thing down by about 1,000 words to get it to my ideal word count. Shouldn’t be too hard!
Then (drum roll, please!) I start the query process and see if this manuscript has legs!
Enjoy the end of summer, everyone – I am!
