The last big round of edits is done! The end is in sight! (gulp)
On Monday, I finished reviewing my editor’s suggestions, which included a few plot changes as well as some minor grammar stuff. In all, I ended up adding four new chapters to the book (which, for perspective, is now 35 chapters total). It’s at a really good place, word-count-wise and otherwise. Minus some more light edits, it’s reached its final pre-publication stage.
I had meant to set my draft aside, refresh, and then get back to it next Monday to do a final read-through before starting queries. The one problem with that is . . . it’s scary!
It’s scary because this is my final draft. This is the end of writing the book, and the start of marketing the book. This is where my thought process takes a hard right and begins to loop: But is the story really the best it can be? Is the plot completely 100% coherent? Does the setting make total sense? Did I do all the cool things I wanted to do from the very beginning? Do I even remember what all of those were?
Ha, of course I remember all of them. ALL OF THEM. Because I wrote them all down in half a dozen different notebooks which I definitely haven’t been obsessively checking . . .
Mostly I’ve been dealing with this irrational fear by focusing on one tiny step at a time. And there’s lots to do (on top of real life) with my downtime between edits:
- plan for a newsletter — coming soon to a website near you!
- start a list of agents to send queries to
- edit my query letter! Fortunately I have a leg up in that department.
- keep researching & planning for the rest of the series
- and of course, keep working on short stories.
So, TLDR: I’m 90% done with editing Beauty and the Alchemist, and plan to send out the first round of actual query letters to actual agents by July. Things are falling into place! 🙂
