Editing Update - Almost There!

Whew! The Writer Therapy bloghop was a rush. I cruised the interwebs and peeked in on the writing habits of two dozen of my fellow wanna be authors (and an occasional published one). It is exhilarating to see that there is so much support among the writing community.

I also saw more traffic in two days to this little corner of the blogosphere than in the last month. That's very cool. I hope my ramblings, rants and occasional Dr. Suess riff were well-received. Welcome to all those that dropped by and decided to follow.

The blog hop made me peek through previous posts and I realized I hadn't updated on the editing of the Work in Progress (WIP) in some time. I can't believe it was over a month ago that I updated. Time doesn't only fly, it zooms like a friggin rocket, causing whole weeks to disappear. But, I am happy to say that the first full-edit of the WIP is nearly complete. Here are the basic stats:

37 Chapters
91,000 words
335 pages

Three of the remaing five chapters are fairly short (under 2k words) but the 'money shot' chapter where everything wraps up is over 5k, so I am going to end up a little higher than I planned at about 107-110k since I still have to add a wrap up chapter now that I have tidied up most of the loose ends.

The cool thing--and those writers out there know exactly what I am talking about--is that as I move through this section of the work, I haven't seen it in several weeks and as I sit down to edit I get lost in the actual reading of my own book. I wrote the damn thing and yet I find myself clicking through page after page asking 'what happens next?!?!'

I take that as a postive sign. :)

Getting to the end of the edits is a mixture of relief, exhilaration and dread. It is good to get through it, but just like the actual writing, I know I had good days and bad days during the editing process. There are still going to be rough patches that need more work. But the book is on the cusp of query ready and I have already generated a list of agents that I will be sending it out to, broken down into a couple of tiers. That causes the dread. Is the query good enough? Is the synopsis good enough (for those agents that want it)? Can I figure out how to convert the damn thing to .RTF? Will I hit send and hear nothing but crickets chirping for the next two months?

Ah, well, for those that have been following from the beginning (Hi Mom! Again!), you know that I will keep pushing on. Over the past six to eight months, I've come to realize that writing is something I will do regardless of whether an agent moons over my work. But I'll get there. Hopefully before retirement age.

Cheers!

AA