Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

It is very cold here, and I write to delay going out into brittle, shard-like sunlight to shovel my drive. Being stabbed in my wincing eye by too-bright light is infinitely preferable to having to shovel in a storm, however, a brutal necessity I have only had to endure a couple of times.

As promised last week, I did finish the editorial run through of everything: the entire book to the last line. Which was rewritten. Am I ecstatic? No. I’m tired, and a grumbling in my head says I have some tinkering yet to do. Which means I’m not finished, and so my promise was not kept. Ugh.

I did definitely rework the scenes to be completely overhauled. This turned into, for me, quite a huge chapter, which was then overhauled and reworked into three chapters of more appropriate length, each with a properly balanced lead from one to the next, including cliffhangers! I’m so 1930s Flash Gordon. Which I did actually watch as a kid, by the way, UK TV with three channels meant you watched what you got, and if that meant ancient Flash Gordon and dodgy rocket ships, then that’s what you watched. Those guys knew how to do cliffhangers.

I also successfully kept the focus on my main character and her development, which I had bizarrely not paid sufficient attention to prior. (I know why, I just can’t tell you because spoilers.) This meant more new writing than I had expected, and changed the interactions around her in a fascinating way. It also scared me a little, as I thought I had one way to end, but it wasn’t her ending, that she had worked so very hard for, it was mine, puzzle pieces placed just where I liked them, for ease of completion. Now it is hers, and that might sound pretentious, but if the book is going to work it has to be her story from start to finish, not hers from start to 90% and me editorializing for the last 10%.  This meant the puzzle pieces were more challenging for me to put together satisfactorily (the part that scared me), which is why the grumbling and tinkering remain to be done, I suspect. Not so much rewrites, but retouches.

And herein lies my caveat. I feel I have to let this sit a bit, and then revisit it, and make sure I have not repeated my mistake of rushing to an arbitrary finish line. I believe everything hangs together well, and the character progress and thematic resolution dovetail nicely, but it could be heavy handed as all get out. Part of me is ok with this. (The part of me that just wants to be done.) Part of me is not. (The part of me that wants to get it right.) So I need to let it rest a short while then look at it again and make sure it isn’t clunky. So yeah, I don’t want it to be heavy handed. See how I tell on myself all the time here? That’s twice already. I promise I won’t let perfectionism get in the way. Promise promise. I have faith in the process, my process, and what I’ve written. One more push, and the content portion is done.

But, in the meantime, proofing can begin as these issues are self contained in the finale, and do not cause problems earlier in the text, which contributes to this finish as much or more than it did to the previous version, which is why I’m pretty sure this is all fine, I’m just too close right now, having literally finished maybe 90 minutes ago, to tell.

So there you have it—in my beloved police procedural metaphor I promised the kid I’d find the killer, and I have, but the prosecution still has to do some work to put the jerk away. But by that stage in the show, everyone knows the bad guy is going to go down. (Unless it’s a rare show with a twist, which I like, but not too often or it gets tired! (And they always get the killer in a later episode, let’s be honest.))

So: proofing begins. Hurrah, hooray, huzzah. Let’s make some detailed choices! Better still, let’s let a proofer make those choices. Over which I have final approval. How many more read-throughs do I have? That many? Oh.