Rolling On..

Finished the 3rd draft, ended up around 75,000 words, about 1500 cut from previous. I've begun my 4th draft, doing edits on paper. As I explained earlier, looking at the writing in a fresh medium brings out all sorts of problems I simply wasn't seeing anymore. What I find is these are mostly just Too Many Words... the bane of early drafts. So, likely it'll be down again to 72,000 words when all's said and done. My agent's itching to see it, so I might try something new this time, though it's a risk. I'm going to go a certain way through my editing, then beginning passing on completed chapters to my proofreaders, and as they go through, if I think the changes are enough I'll, possibly, we'll see how it goes, send the opening chapters and synopsis to the agent for marketing. Problem with this approach is, well, what if the proofreaders find some glaring plot problem?

Well, I suppose it doesn't really matter. Any interested publisher will need to wait for the final manuscript anyway... and this way we take advantage of the usual long wait times of book editors to polish the manuscript. Anyway, like I said, we'll see.

Before I started the new draft, I took a few days to go back through three stories that have been waiting patiently for some final work, and I've sent these out now and it feels good to have more in circulation. There's still one more, a co-written story Michael Arruda and I have been bandying... is that the word?... back and forth for over four years now. It's done, I think, we're just working out what to do with the last sentence. As least it's the last sentence, not the first. :-)
OK. Well that's about it. Any deep insightful thoughts I might have thought to share has, as usual, gone flying out the window as soon as I began writing this....

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