I spent a fair amount of yesterday and all of this morning editing Troubled_Waters. At one point I sat back and looked at a scene that was unquestionably a muddled mess and wondered if I was just making it worse. But self-doubt is familiar territory for me and I plugged on anyway.
This particular stretch of edits has been especially challenging as so many of them have required going backwards and forwards in the timeline, making sure I've not written the same thing twice or said something that conflicted with something else. It's also been difficult to walk away from because every time I do, I lose the thread of what I'm trying to accomplish. Even notes and page numbers don't help. I spend the first hour reacquainting myself with what I'm doing pretty much every time.
I've rewritten a number of the events leading up to the ending, cutting weak logic that I knew was weak when I wrote it, but was so anxious to get on with matters that I let it stand. I don't feel entirely bad about this as I've read books that have made it into print that read like the author did the same thing. I understand how they got there; I'm just amazed that their agents let it stand. Perhaps after you've written several best sellers you can afford to be sloppy. However I believe I am winding up with a more "mature" book than I started with, meaning that it is tighter, more polished, and certainly better organized, than previous projects.
Not being famous and not having thousands of forgiving readers, or an agent (yet), I am hoping this will deliver. I want it done by November 1st as I plan to join Nanowrimo for the 50,000 words in 30 days competition. This particular program has jump-started both of my last two books and I'm hoping it will be the same this time. Maybe I'll even make all 50,000 by the end of the month this time.
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