I finished the editorial changes to book 1 Future Discovered a little over three weeks ago and sent the re-written document out to some Beta readers. I took a little time away from the writing and then took on the edits and re-write of Immortal Guardian. Keep in mind I work on these only two to four hours a day.
I just finished the first editorial run through about twenty minutes ago. The editor had LOTS of comments. So, I went for the relatively easy ones first. I say relatively easy because I had some idea of what to do to respond to the comments. So, I just went through the manuscript again and found that I chose to pass by 38 more difficult comments. Ugh! 38!
Interestingly enough both manuscripts had about the same number of overall editorial comments. But I must be getting a little better at the re-writing because this time, things seem to be going faster. My deadline to get both books back to the editor is August 1. Now I think I will make that with time to spare. Just 38 fixes to go.
I’m glad that I took an author friend’s advice (L.G. “Liz” O’Connor) and worked with the goal of publishing two books at the same time (I wanted to do three, but that had to change given the comments I had to react to).
The advantage to writing at least two books in the series at about the same time is that you can go back and forth between the two to make changes. For example, Immortal Guardian had some activity taking place in Iraq which was really not in sync with what the protagonist’s (the hero’s) goals were. And the editor didn’t like it since it didn’t seem to advance the plot of the Guardian. So, I went back into Future Discovered and created a reason to be in Iraq that was consistent with the overall goals of the protagonist. Bingo, now I had a reason to be in Iraq in Immortal Guardian. I did, however, make some substantial changes to that part of the book that actually reduced the overall word count by about three thousand words.
I pay attention to word count. Most fiction books that I am familiar with in this genre are between eighty and eighty-five thousand words. So taking out three thousand creates a dent in the overall number. However, I’m finding that when I make all the editorial changes, I add a lot of words. At present, Immortal Guardian is sitting at about 83,400 words. That number will go up and down as more edits are made.
Now it’s back to work.
