The Great Editing Week-Off

Right. This coming week, I’m off work. (Mostly; I’ve still got some freelance stuff to do.) This is nominally because of my birthday next week, but that’s only one day. I have some errands to run, some things to do… but I have one real purpose for this week. One thing I intend to do if it kills me.

Edit. The. Book.

I reckon I’m about ¾ of the way through the redraft of The Owl in the Labyrinth now. This is a significantly longer ¾ than I intended to end up with at nearly 90,000 words, but hopefully it’ll still end up shorter than the gargantuan first draft and merely be ‘really bloody big’. For context, Nightingale’s Sword was about 98,000 words and Blackbird 63,000. This was always going to be a big book – I’m just hoping I can get it to the point where it’s not literally as long as both its predecessors combined.

I have a whole week to sit down and focus and get some chapters trimmed. I’m not fully rewriting, just re-evaluating: I’ve tinkered with the structure especially of the second act, and now need to make sure the consequences of that tinkering are properly borne out in acts 3 and 4. I got through act 3 last week: one of my favourite extended sequences I’ve ever written, because who doesn’t enjoy writing about steampunk submarines? I have finally reunited some people who really needed reuniting – my dream team is back together and now I need to actually wrap up the bloody plot.

There are some obvious cuts I can think of, which is handy. There are some changes I’m torn on making, too. Some fates may change; some characters may emerge more scathed than they did in the original draft. But the ultimate ending should stay the same, or thereabouts. The main challenge will be re-balancing and definitely cutting down the Big Climactic Sequence with its 3 separate POVS and way too much waffling along the way. All the set-pieces are really cool, and I liked writing them, but when I get into these things I often find myself getting carried away. I have so much fun writing cool fights – a case in point would be the airship hijacking in Nightingale, which was originally about twice as long as it ended up being – that I just don’t want to stop and they balloon into unwieldy messes. This is definitely the case for Owl’s climax. I had cool ideas to start with, and came up with more as I wrote and desperately shoved them in. Some will have to go. But nothing in my library is ever wasted: I’m sure I can find uses for such fun snippets of action elsewhere. Maybe in those Boiling Seas short stories I’ve been talking about…

I don’t expect to completely finish the redraft this week. But I do intend to get as far into it as I can, because I want to get my little proofreading crew on-task by Christmas. There will be more things that need changing, I know it. This is a monster of a book, wrapping up lots of threads, and I really, really want to take the time to make it as good as it can be.

But I also want it done. I can’t let myself start another long-form project until Owl is finished; if I do, I’ll just get distracted and it’ll be another bloody year before the thing comes out. I have ideas aplenty waiting in the wings. But Owl must fly first.

I’ll post updates on my Twitter/Bluesky on how this week goes as it goes, and this time next week I’ll tell you all the final result.

Let’s see what I can do.