Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

So a few weeks ago I’d finished again. Well, now I’ve started again.

This is not editing hell. Exactly.

But I have felt moved to fix some detail work. I decided to remove all sets of parentheses (there were three), and will give $15 to the first person who correctly identifies where they all were in the text. I could get away with parentheses in the last book (I thought), because it was a first person narrative, so the narrator’s asides could easily drop into parentheses.  This book is not so structured, and therefore does not need parentheticals.

And, as any reader of my blog is aware, I am over-fond of exclamation marks. I was reading an early exchange, and was assaulted by exclamation overkill. So I decided to see how many were in the book overall. It was too many. I have edited that down to 34 instances, and may whittle a few more, but there are imperatives, pious exclamations and call and responses that do not, I think, fall into typical exclamation mark abuse territory. It was amusing to note how many exclamations were really there to note a point of emphasis for me, but if removed did not actually change a thing. I was ending my sentence with a flourish! When it wasn’t really needed.

So I switched some exclamations out for periods, in other sentences I added a word in italics to highlight the intention in the speaker with more specificity rather than plonking an exclamation point at the end of the sentence. That does tend to have less precision in terms of meaning conveyed, when you think about it. There are a few deletions I know I’m going to want to revisit, but hey, on the next read-through I’ll see if I notice their absence. If I do: the exclamation point may be merited. I have noticed that in the text the exclamation points start slow (3 in the first 100 pages) and grow more frequent as the book advances toward its climax—proof it gets more exciting! That’s how it works, right? It’s all by design, baby.  

Finally, I was forced to reckon with the amount of tears in this book. Tears of joy, gratitude, angst, sadness, grief, physical pain, and more! It’s a lot of tears, crying, sobs and weeping. Now this book is about a series of emotional crises that together contribute to a crisis of faith and the impassioned search for its resolution. (In other words: a typical fantasy novel.) However, even accounting for that heightened emotional state and ongoing lowered resistance to stress, it could be too much.

So I’m going to need emotionally charged moments, without the eye leaks. Unless you, my dear chums and pals, rise up now and say, with a sniffle, that you want all the lachrymose moments I can possibly provide! Here come the tears, baby! (And there was not a single sniffle in the book, by the way. I have standards. (Not really!))

That is, of course, editing. After a copy edit, after a proof read. Of issues I should have noticed and addressed earlier. I have to say my Scottish beta readers did not complain about the tears, and they are a pretty stoic lot, so maybe I’m over egging it at the last minute. This would not be a surprise to me.

What do you think, my friends? Let me know! Until next week, follow the tears!