Edits… edited.
I think… I might be finished?
Well, finished for now, at least.
Quick run-through of how I handled these edits:
Received edits, which were about 2.5 pages of paragraphs and bullet points in Word. I have to give massive credit to my editor, Kesia, here because these notes were a lovely mix of “we’d like you to do this” and “by the way, there’s still loads we love about the book” so it felt supportive and, honestly 2.5 pages of notes were super easy to digest.
I took out all the stuff that wasn’t a directive/suggestion in the notes and turned them into bullet points.
Added some notes of my own about how to achieve some of these changes to that file.
Deleted all the stuff that was easy to simply delete (e.g. whole chapters of sub-plot).
Panicked. Talked to my mum. Stopped panicking.
Moved around a bunch of chapters to switch up the pacing and some of the event timings. Made it all look like a jumbled mosaic, but gave me faith I could get it to work.
Wrote a couple of new chapters and a whole host of new scenes.
Used YouTube soundscapes and Pomodoro-style study videos to take it chapter-by-chapter, checking with my bullet-pointed list that I was adding in/changing the right things.
Got almost to the end, panicked again, and taught myself to crochet in a single day as a means of avoiding editing, which left me with a nasty pain in between my left thumb and forefinger because I was holding my hook too tensely.
Finally edited the last chapter and realised it feels good to have made all my changes.
And look,
I miss the characters from the subplot I cut out. Of course I do; they were an entire facet of the world I’ve built, and now they’re just… gone.
But. Losing that word count meant I could add in a bunch of other stuff, some of it requested by my editor, and some of it my own. The stuff that’s my own feels right to be going in too because a lot of it is geeky detail, gothy preoccupation… that is, exactly the kind of stuff that made me want to write this book in the first place. Seeing it in there (even if no one else really notices!) makes it feel much more like the book 16-year-old me first had the idea for.
Which has to be a good thing, right?
So, what now?
Well, I’m not entirely sure. I am going to quell the urge to immediately send this out to my editor immediately, as much as the “teacher’s pet” living within me wants me to do that. Instead, I’m going to try to read the whole thing out loud to myself next weekend, so I can hopefully catch any glaring errors I might have accidentally written in while making my changes.
But then… I will need to send this back, and then, no doubt, I’ll get mor editorial notes — perhaps less focused on plot and more on individual characters, or scenes.
So I’ll be back with more editing stories soon, I am sure!