Editing progress

Just a quick note on the progress of Book 19 editing...

I had a good book, but after these edits, it's even better. A lot of big things have been fixed. I have a love/hate relationship with editing. I love when I find things to fix yet hate that it was ever needed. I'm glad to realize and fix the issues, though.

Aside form what I mentioned previously, I've expanded one scene and corrected others that I realized weren't quite clear or in the third round ended up being head-scratchers of what I was doing in the first draft other than getting the thoughts down to the best of my abilities. This is nothing new. It's all part of the writing process.

I'm 3/4 done with round three of edits. I fixed so many big issues in the second round in some places that they overshadowed the other issues still there. In any case, the story is getting beaten into shape. Each round of edits refines it in new ways. If you saw the difference between the first and final drafts, you'd be amazed. The transformation is huge--from subplot issues to character descriptions to scene locations to action correlations and logical sequence corrections. And then there's the minor issues of pronoun/antecedents, cleaning up unnecessary narrative or redundancies, etc.

Once I'm done with this pass, I'll see how round four goes. I hope that will be the last, but a fifth could be needed, which would push back the publishing date. I'll see what happens. I hate that I've been finding issues (no matter how minor) with earlier books that I thought were done. It puts a new fear in me of none of the books being ready, but I know part of that is also just me getting nitpicky and always wanting to fix things. (This is the longest of the books of this series so far at 57,000 words, which is also why it's taking longer to edit.)

Once I'm done with this, I'll go back to writing... Book 22 awaits. With that, I'm getting close to the end of the series, but there are a couple of adventures to write to answer lingering questions before the series climax.

Thanks for reading!