I’ve written a hell of a lot of words these last few days. You remember how a couple weeks ago I marked down on the permanence of the internet that I’d finished my book.
Yeah. About that. I have this thing I do whilst I’m editing. I add words rather than subtract.
At its height, my manuscript topped 113k. Which is nothing in the grand scheme of things. I could take this MS to 140k if agents would take even the slightest look at it. But to be safe, I’d like it to be under 110k.
And wouldn’t you know it. After writing and rewriting the ending about eight times now, I’ve got it to 109k.
And now I can begin cutting the fat.
Third draft. This is where I get in and perfect. I’ll spend a week in this place, reading it and taking the pages of notes I made whilst on the second draft and applying them. Maybe I adjusted something later that will require a tweak early on. A character that came back needs a bit of fleshing out. A world-building rule that I needed to change in order to get a character from A to B. And of course making sure that the whole thing is as polished as I can get it. Because after this draft.
I read.
I turn my word doc to a PDF and pop it on my kindle app and highlight all the bad things. The errors I’ve been looking at for months. Like the time I forgot the L at the end of the word pool. Gross. I’ll highlight anything that feels too cliche. Those phrases I see way too often. Like “ran his hand through his hair” or “she bristled” (I use the word bristle a LOT. Such a great word!)
And once I make those changes I’ll dive into the overused words. THAT. ACTUALLY. PROBABLY. REALLY. VERY. JUST. THEN. etc. etc. followed by trying to trim down the “felt” and “thought” tags, though my MS doesn’t use a lot of those, a quirk of my protagonist. Can’t hurt to trim the ones still there. Took a look. I have 105 instances of thought. Not bad! I could probably lose have of those easily.
But in the mean time I’m more than excited it’s under 110k today. But tomorrow?
That’s another story.
Here’s a wee line from my manuscript. May or may not have been written today. The days have run together.
A small access panel opens.
A beam of artificial light straight from mouths of demons.
Goodnight, dear readers. And adieu.
DC Adams, Author 