Edits, Round Two

The second round of edits for Fairest of the Faire were received from my editor at the publisher, and they were a bit more daunting.  All of the piddly stuff that was mostly style-sheet related, or me using some filtering words, has been dealt with in the first round.  The second round gets into more nitty-gritty stuff.  Namely, my ability to overload any good novel with a bunch of useless back story.

Now, I’m not saying back story is never important, but long, detailed back story is just boring and no one wants to read it.  That is especially true in my genre – contemporary romance.  The story needs to be fairly quick-paced, and get to the meat of the situation pretty quickly.

So, it was chop, lop, and shred on the first chapter of the novel, which was almost completely boring backstory.  The edited chapter (rewritten, actually) is much tighter, but also a bit more “action-y.”  Yes, I just made that word up.  But what it needed was more action, less back story, less boring.  I think the rewrite is good.  We’ll see what the editor thinks of it.

In the meantime, I’m working on my next novel.  I’m writing consistently, although I need to write more than a couple days a week if I expect to have a rough draft done by the end of February.  I learned from the first novel, and have plenty of action in my first chapter, with very little back story.  I think the story is actually coming along pretty well, and faster than some of my other attempts over the years.  We’ll see if there’s really enough to build a story from, but so far, it’s looking good.

My next round of edits should come back from the editor in mid-February or sooner.  The editor thinks there won’t be but one more edit, making the total 3.  I can live with that.  With any luck, then, my book will be in print by the end of the year.

Yes, that’s a looooong time away, but that gives me time to get novel two ready to be submitted.  I need to have another one ready to go, or already in the editing process, by the time the first one comes out.  The key to being successful is to be putting out new novels in regular intervals.  Novel two does not have a title yet, and hopefully something occurs to me shortly.  It took two years for Fairest of the Faire to get a title.  I don’t have two years for this one!