It's back to work on the work in progress, this time on the second rewrite.
The first rewrite was quite a chore since I hadn't looked at the manuscript in six months or so. It took much longer than I expected to go through the 60k-plus words, about 10 arduous weeks.
This time should go more quickly, perhaps even 10 days, if I don't encounter too many distractions along the way. That's another reason I spend most of my time in the early hours working on a manuscript.
I generally go through 10 or 11 rewrites before I'm satisfied enough to submit it to my editor at Wings ePress. That's not to say she receives a perfect manuscript; far from it. But I do hope it creates less work for her in the long run in that she can focus more on story than on other elements.
As noted in previous posts, this novel will be the fourth in the John Ross Boomer Lit series. In the last novel, New Horizons, the story focused on John and Sally Ross's trip to Budapest. Now they're back home in Kentucky and dealing with domestic adventures of various and sundry sorts, to put it lightly. Retirement isn't what John expected when he left the newspaper business.
What I try to do in a second rewrite (and probably every rewrite to clean and fine-tune) is to add/delete descriptions, tighten dialogue, make grammatical and spelling corrections, and delve more into characters to show their motivations and what makes them tick.
And I'll add or expand scenes to enhance the story and delete others that bog down the flow or don't add to the overall development of the plot/subplots.
Until the next time . . .
The first rewrite was quite a chore since I hadn't looked at the manuscript in six months or so. It took much longer than I expected to go through the 60k-plus words, about 10 arduous weeks.
This time should go more quickly, perhaps even 10 days, if I don't encounter too many distractions along the way. That's another reason I spend most of my time in the early hours working on a manuscript.
I generally go through 10 or 11 rewrites before I'm satisfied enough to submit it to my editor at Wings ePress. That's not to say she receives a perfect manuscript; far from it. But I do hope it creates less work for her in the long run in that she can focus more on story than on other elements.
As noted in previous posts, this novel will be the fourth in the John Ross Boomer Lit series. In the last novel, New Horizons, the story focused on John and Sally Ross's trip to Budapest. Now they're back home in Kentucky and dealing with domestic adventures of various and sundry sorts, to put it lightly. Retirement isn't what John expected when he left the newspaper business. What I try to do in a second rewrite (and probably every rewrite to clean and fine-tune) is to add/delete descriptions, tighten dialogue, make grammatical and spelling corrections, and delve more into characters to show their motivations and what makes them tick.
And I'll add or expand scenes to enhance the story and delete others that bog down the flow or don't add to the overall development of the plot/subplots.
Until the next time . . .
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