Update: Whew, that was a lot

Okay, so my really intense week last week, especially my insanely intense Friday, was MAINLY Kim’s fault, but I admit it was a little bit my fault too because I didn’t skim through her full comments about Silver Circle #2 until last thing, when I was finished with everything else for #2.

And why?

Because Kim’s suggestion to combine six chapters into three seemed like the big thing. I thought, fine, that’s probably good advice, especially the part about how to start Part 2, I’ll do that first. So I did, and also read through the entire manuscript from top to bottom, and cut quite a bit — I cut 12,000 words, and SC #2 is now almost exactly twice as long as SC #1 — and fixed a handful of typos flagged by someone else, all while kind of forgetting to look at the actual full manuscript with the rest of Kim’s comments.

Then, Thursday night, I remembered about that and thought, fine, I’d just skim through those comments Friday morning and boom, a couple of hours, done.

But no!

There was all this advice, almost all of it obviously accurate. How about starting this chapter three pages later? How about cutting some of the description through this part here? Since this character turns out not to be important, maybe cut this prior appearance of the character?

I have, generally speaking, only one of two possible reactions to suggestions like this:

A) Huh, I don’t think so.

or

B) Duh, obviously.

And I’m glad to say that as a rule, people give me good advice and therefore reaction (B) is by far the most common reaction I have to editorial feedback, but that does mean a good bit of time tweaking this and that. In this case, basically all of Kim’s suggestions fell into the “duh, obviously” category. But just deciding to cut the first three pages of a chapter doesn’t mean a straight-up delete-and-done. No, it means finding a way to save the two or three lines that are actually setup for something that happens later, while cutting most of the rest of those pages.

So, this only took a day. But it took ALL DAY. I actually wound up just taking Friday off work completely and focusing solely on SC #2, and while I did get it done, it was a loooong day. But I sent the more or less final version to the second wave of early readers Friday afternoon just before five, and before you say that five doesn’t seem that late, let me mention that I got up at four that morning because that’s how I roll, my schedule is orthogonal to the normal-person schedule, so yes, that was a really long day.

Then I went home and started reading this fanfic one of you recommended — ah, Elaine’s Teen, and thank you, Teen, for this recommendation — called Cultivating the Slow Life, because a 450,000-word slice-of-life fic was exactly what I wanted after a day like that. Not that I got all that far into it. We’re at the base of the mountain.

Also, I sent the most updated Silver Circle #2 to my kindle app so I can start proofreading it. That’s not the right term. Tweak-reading. Lots of fiddling with sentences at this point. Still, moving along.

Also, having more or less recovered from Friday’s intense focus on SC #2, on Saturday, I created the individual file for SC #3 and started doing the primary revision I’ve had in mind for … it seems like a long time, but probably only weeks. Anyway, I’m now doing primary revision for that and let me see, wow, it’s not even the middle of October, quite, so there’s a good chance I’ll be sending that to early readers before the end of the month.

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