Editing... For Real This Time

You may have noticed that I did not post a Six Sentence Sunday post today. The reason? For one, I didn't do any editing this week. I know, shame on me. But, I was also waiting to get a printed copy of Hidden Souls.

My rough draft (with widened margins) is 164 pages. The last 50 pages are going to need some heavy edits, I know already.

Why print my rough draft? Well, it occurred to me as I was going through the electronic copy of my first draft that I wasn't really doing any editing. Sure, I went through each page, maybe made a few minor edits, but I wasn't making those changes that would make my story stronger. I found a website that makes a lot of good suggestions about how to edit your manuscript (in ONE pass), so I decided to go that way. I got my copy this morning, and have spent about 2 hours going through the first part of the manuscript again. I'm roughly 11 pages in.



The good news? I cut my first scene. And it wasn't the scene I thought I was going to cut. It was actually a scene where Sophia is getting home from dinner. It's just a filler scene before she has her first dream. So it got cut.

The bad news? My word count before these edits is just under 50,000. My goal is to get it up to 90,000, which is the low limit of publishable for most novels. That means I have to bolster my word count quite a bit. Some of it will be with description, because quite a bit of my phrasing is really weak and my description of scenes definitely isn't what is in my head.

But I may end up adding a couple subplots as well. If you can read on the above picture, the book propped up behind my manuscript is my writing journal, where I write down all the ideas I have and flesh them out. Two of the subplots I plan on focusing on are Michael's identity (I did a little bit with last Sunday's post, and obviously the character sketch, but I really want to focus on it more), as well as Sophia's past. I haven't decided what her past is going to entail yet, but it will impact where she ends up when she projects.

Anyway, stay tuned for more excerpts! Hopefully, within the next couple weeks, I'll finish editing. Maybe then I'll consider sending out query letters.