Editing is rough stuff.

I’m starting to think there may have been a reason that I’ve been letting my previous manuscripts fester stew. Editing, it seems, is hard work. I began editing what was then known as Convocation the day I finished it–November 30th. Then, it was just over fifty-thousand terse words long, in ten sprawling chapters.

Now–February 1st–it’s a different beast. Now, it’s The Stone Sorter. Chapters have been reordered, passages added. The beginning was massively rewritten. There’s now a new epilogue. It currently weighs in at 62,000 words, in twenty-three chapters plus an epilogue and prologue. Miranda’s motivations have been refined, her daily life clarified. I couldn’t have gotten this far without my three most-prompt beta readers: Pat, Tarah, and Michele. Their advice was all succinct, clear, and, amazingly, it largely agreed. The book was too short, they said. What didn’t work for one didn’t work for any of them. These are three very different readers; I wasn’t anticipating such a consensus. But I’m glad they agreed. It’s sure made my job easier.

Because it’s hard enough already. I’ve moved into line edits now, smoothing my rumpled, messy sentences, fixing typos (my favorite? “He turned crispy” for “He turned crisply.”), moving, I hope, from the functional to the artful. It’s slow, painful work, but necessary work. I’m not sure that I’ll leave any sentence as it was at its inception, untouched and unedited. This is a good thing. But it’s a difficult thing. It’s so much easier to let words tumble from you, especially once you know your characters. Because they write the book. I close my eyes, ask them what they’re up to, and they tell me. My job, I guess, is to make sense of it–to make it good. That’s not an easy task.

Since, I’ve found, setting deadlines here in the blog consistently lets me beat them, I’ll say right now: my goal is to start querying by the Ides of March. Any writerly types have any thoughts for agents? I have a couple in mind, a few I’m following on the internet, but I don’t want to leave any stone–pun intended, of course–unturned.