on editing

I’ve been editing-o-rama this week, and it’s going much more smoothly than I had expected.

I cut out a lot more without even having to think about it so the draft is hovering around the 90k mark at the moment. I kept everything in files in case I want to add things back, but I’m liking it on the shorter side. Haven’t read it all end-to-end yet, but it seems like a good length.

I’m actually kind of baffled that I set a schedule that I stuck to. I think it helps to have the impending wonderment that is NaNoWriMo to keep me motivated to just finish this up already, but I’m actually kind of ahead of schedule. Baffling.

Maybe I just work better in the autumn, or the cooler weather and earlier sunsets make my brain function in a less lazy way.

Regardless, I am on a very good track to have a finished, polished draft by mid-October to give to a handful of trusted readers, leaving me free to work on something else entirely for November. Oh, to work on something else entirely after over two years! I cannot even say how exciting that is. Just to explore someplace different for awhile (all my writing seems to be very place-based, maybe that’s a blog for another day) will be such a nice change.

Editing has been easier than I had expected, too. I tend to edit as I go a lot, and I’ve edited large chunks of the book already, so a lot of it is smoothing out the edges and making the details coherent and just making it pretty. And in re-reading sections that I haven’t read in quite some time I’m finding I just like reading it as a reader, which is probably a very good sign.

I tend to get to a point while working on a painting where it just feels finished. I can detail it a bit more and add a few touches (or spatters, usually) but the painting itself is there already. I wasn’t really expecting it, but the book is starting to feel like that. That it’s there and I’m just playing with shading and flourishes.

Yeah, so writing is good this week. Even with mercury retrograde.