Quite a while ago now I posted up about having finished the second draft and beginning my own editing of it. That was done in September and the book went off to the editor at the start of October. On Tuesday, a month later (it is a big book of 114,000 words) they came back with their first set of edits and we had an hour long skype chat where we talked about their changes.
Going into the call I was nervous, this was the first person to have read through the whole second draft and also the first to do so with a very critical eye. I mean worst case scenario they would have told me I needed to rewrite the whole thing to get it up to scratch.
Luckily the news was not worst case, or even bad. The news was quite good.
Okay there were plenty of grammar issues, but I was expecting that with this being the first ever book I’ve properly finished, and that is why you hire an editor. When it came to the story there were no big revisions suggested which was great to hear. There are some of my own I’m going to add in as they add more depth to the story and setting. But it is nice to hear that the entire thing doesn’t suck.
The main changes needed revolve around the amount of dialog v the amount of description, I have way too much of the former and not enough of the latter. I also repeated the same information within and across chapters.
So there are things I need to change, but I knew that to begin and now I know what I need to do to make the book better. I’m first of all going through all the revisions the editor has made and incorporating them and then it is on to the more substantial changes by myself.
It feels great to be working on the book again after a break, I hope I can get all these revisions done by the end of the month and back to the editor but we’ll see.
There is a good book here, now is the time for me to really put in the work to make that happen. Onwards I go.