The Great Editing Week-Off – Results

So what I should have done, before I started this Big Week of Editing, was note down where I’d actually gotten to in the edit so far, so I could tally up how much I got done without having to re-read my own tweets and do the maths again. But I didn’t, so I’ve just been scrolling back through a very big Word doc, counting words and pages and figuring out where I was at this time last week.

In summation: I got quite a lot done.

Last week, The Owl in the Labyrinth’s second draft was just under 90,000 words long – now it’s cracked 105,000. 8 chapters, 15,000+ words, and 50 pages of book have been added to the increasingly unwieldy behemoth that is this grand finale to the Boiling Seas. Given I also added 1500 words to another short story early in the week, I’d say that’s pretty good going for 6 days of work, especially given one of them was my birthday and I was somewhat distracted!

Is the draft done yet? Oh, absolutely not. There are 34,000 words left in the original manuscript. I’m not going to add all of those, but I am going to have to write a bunch of new ones to replace some of them. I’ve reached Part 4 of 4 – which, while a great milestone, also heralds the most complicated part of the edit so far. I thought the Part 2 heist sequence was complicated: now I’ve managed to split all 3 POVs up again in a dramatic race to do 17 things at once to stop the villains doing Villain Things. And I’m doing it differently to the original draft, which means a lot more cutting and pasting and reworking around the new plot.

This bit’s going to take a while, is what I’m saying. But as complex as it is, it’s still the home stretch. All the players are in the final location, the big scrap has begun, and the end is very much in sight. It’s going to be a tough task to get there but I’m confident that it won’t take too long. Having this second draft done by the end of the year seems very much possible.

Can I dedicate as much time to the edit in this last month as I have this week? No: I have jobs to do and taxes to pay. But if I can just do a few thousand words a week then it’s possible. My proofreaders might even get it in time for Christmas.

Just being in this place makes me nervous. I’ve spent longer working on this book than I have on anything I’ve published, and I want it to work. This final push, this final action-packed sequence, will make or break the whole thing, and I really have to get it right: for you lot and for myself.

So no pressure, eh?

Now, I’ve got a little time today, so let’s get another chunk done, just to round the week off nicely.