Let the Editing Begin!

I've begun editing the Irish Novel - aka The Long Road Home. The first 150 pages have been printed and read over, red quill pen in hand, and page 151-278 will be printed this afternoon (I don't want the IC library getting too mad at an alum using their printing services).

I like editing on paper - it's easier to see things on a printed page than on screen sometimes, and somewhat therapeutic to strike through lines of stilted prose with my red pen.

This novel needs a lot of work. Quite a lot. There are a lot of strings to pull, and at the moment they're a little bit more gnarled up than they should be. Character arcs that don't quite add up, a lot of worldbuilding that needs to be in place way before it is, and a lot that needs to be established earlier in order to make the conclusion work. Especially when it comes to my secondary villains.

But I'm really hoping that I can pull this off the way it deserves to be pulled off. I really think this one could mean something, if I can just weave all those strings together in the right way, get all these pieces to really resonate the way they should.

So I'll spend the next few weeks making notes in red pen, rearranging and adding and cutting. After that, it'll be off to the beta readers, who hopefully won't hate it. And hopefully, by the end of it, I'll have a finished product that really shines. The plan is to have it ready to submit to agents by November, when NaNoWriMo is in full swing for all those people insane dedicated enough to try and churn out 50k words in a month.

And then - well, I guess I get to figure out how the heck to squeeze this one into a query letter.