Week 79 – The End of the (Editing) Affair – part two

I have finished editing the novel, finally.  Oh, to be free of it for a little while, to rest without thinking which words to cut, amend, replace. To read without wondering if I’ve used the right tone, or kept in the right voice for the character.  Birds are singing, bunnies are hopping and the deer are gracefully leaping over fallen branches, to come and see what all the music is about…

Ok, so finishing it doesn’t quite put me in the middle of a Disney cartoon, but it is a relief.  I’ve got about 87,250 words (I miscounted by 1000 before, oops!) which is a bit longer than planned, but not horribly so, and as I said before, any professional editor worth their salt will rip bits out anyway!  I cannot look at it any more for now, so it’s lucky I’ve sent it to be proofread by someone else!

Sadly, the next on my list of things to do is the first read-through of the woods novel – more editing and revising.  I could put that off and start the planning process for the third book, but to be honest, I’m a little tired of prose, and want to focus on poetry for a few days, so I’m going to do that.  I hope to finish the peace poem, tidy up the elements I identified at the reading last week, print off all finished work for my portfolio and generally make everything all neat and tidy from a poetic point of view.

I’m also now a day behind on the astrobiology quizzes, and need to catch up – but at least you can’t point and laugh that I put it first!

Looking back at The End of the (Editing) Affair part one, it’s amazing that I’ve been through so many revisions, redrafts and edits since then.  The book is really a different animal now.  Which is good – then it was a newly hatched chick, now it is a grown bird.

Hopefully not a turkey though… 😉

There isn’t much other news this week – apart from library closures or unhappy tales of the decline in reading, I haven’t seen much worth sharing – except headline news, which will be the focus of Thursday’s deferred post.  However, I have just been sent details of another poetry reading night (I think my friend is trying to get me on a roll to keep my confidence up) so I’m aiming to go that.  Maybe focussing on poetry for a few days will be a good thing!

Until next time, happy writing,

EJ

🙂