Update: WHEW

While “finished” is a strong term, I did send Silver Circle #3 to early readers on Sunday afternoon.

Seriously: whew!

As expected, I snipped off the epilogue because it’s not finished. Is it more than half finished? Probably. Is it mostly finished? That might be going a little far. Will I enjoy finishing it? Yes, I will; I always like the falling action / epilogue / everyone lives happily ever after part.

Anyway, this time, the primary revision was a huge deal, with far more rewriting and finishing than usual. Half a chapter got completely replaced here; complete new scenes got added there; characters once present for a series of five chapters disappeared and then played a different role when they finally reappeared; four complete chapters got added and then two got combined into one, and the whole thing just went on and on, argh.

However, I hope it’s pretty smooth at this point. Except for not having the epilogue.

What’s next?

Breathing for a few days and not even looking at it. Ha ha, no just kidding. I’m going to start over and re-read it from the top, with an eye to continuity, proofing, tweaking, and trimming. I would sort of like to lose 10,000 words or so, which should be very possible as I haven’t done any trimming so far. Or if I have, it was long enough ago that I have literally forgotten about it. Trimming would be good because that would make room for the epilogue and updated character list. The full version with the partial epilogue is about 177,000 words, which is about the length I start to say ARGH, FOR GOD’S SAKE, TRIM THIS MONSTER. Or, I mean, I cut it in half, but obviously I’m not going to cut this one into pieces because that would be ARGH in a different way. Anyway, if I can ditch 10,000 words, great.

Though there’s another brief scene I might want to add …

ANYWAY, it’s far, far closer to really finished than it was. Let me see. Ten days till Thanksgiving. Okay, I would be REALLY GRATEFUL to be just about at the pure proofreading stage by Thanksgiving, or at least by the end of the Thanksgiving weekend. We’ll see!

I’ll put this book up for preorder on Amazon as soon as comments come back and I confirm — hopefully — that secondary revision won’t be too insane. If it drops on Amazon before Christmas, it won’t be much before, so I hereby declare that this is a Christmas novel. It sort of is, what with the story taking place during the weeks right before Christmas.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Update: WHEW appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.