The plan was to send the edits back to the publisher today. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Christmas/travelling/landlords/back problems got in the way. So I am hauling the mass of pages over to Berry and the new plan is to have it in the mail by Friday.
This was also impacted by not being one hundred percent sure HOW to tackle the changes necessary. My editor identified three things (all backstory but big) that needed to be addressed while I had two things (plot based0 that I wanted to adjust/thread through. I’d read somewhere that a good idea was to work through one thing at a time, which I started to do, except then some things overlapped, and then as you get to the end of the book and everything pulls together I found I needed to know about things that I hadn’t really decided on yet…
So after a week of pulling two of the things through, I went back, made my decisions on the rest and started again, going page by page. There’s a lot of tweaking, a lot of changes. I’ll be emailing literally dozens of new paragraphs or scenes through to the editor, while the pages themselves are such a scrawl that I’m feeling sorry for the poor typesetter.
I finished it all yesterday, but now I’m going to go through the book from beginning to end, reading every sentence (including all the new sections) and making sure it makes sense and that what I’ve written is good quality, spelt right and so on. I have to say, I’m really happy with how the book has turned out and I’m so glad I’ve gone through this process. It’s now a much stronger story, with a more interesting and deep world, then it was when it was purchased by HarperCollins last year.
I’ll be sending the edits back a few days before deadline, so hopefully the editor will have time to work her way through all the changes and make sure everything makes sense. But damn, that Christmas/travelling/landlords/back problem thing has been a pain in the arse.
I need to get going on book two. It’s due at the publisher on Feb 1.
Over the next couple of days, I also need to clean the house, pack, travel to Berry and most importantly, celebrate my tenth wedding anniversary.
Hmm, wonder why I’m feeling a bit stressed?