44 Day Challenge - Success

My 44 Day Challenge for one pass of editing is complete. Actually, I finished it on 30th of April but since I was doing a guest post, this one is delayed a little.

Editing is a strange thing for me - sometimes I love it, sometimes I get bored that I have to do it, and sometimes I get annoyed that it's not showing the scene as I want it to. But coming back to love it part - there were scenes that I read, and I was so surprised that they were there, because I just loved them. Scenes that did not need changes beyond polishing or spelling errors. Of course those are few, compared to tons of others that need major changes.

Overall, the challenge was success. But, the overall book yet is not at the state I would have liked after that. It is essentially due to the major new plot thread I added towards the end of the book. Because that needs a lot of new scenes, and of course story line woven through already written scenes, it is A LOT of work, and HIGH word count. 

Just to give you an example,  the first draft was 81539 words. Currently, my draft is 87000+, and I am not done adding new scenes. This is also while constantly cutting out excess words. So I expect the whole draft to go over 90K when all the scenes are there, and I still need to add descriptions. But then editing afterwards should trim it down again. 

I have started second pass of editing. I am trying to do a quick one with this, to go through, fix what I see, and most importantly work with the new scenes in making a seamless draft. Probably after that I will do another detailed editing. So yes, a lot of work. But the best part is when I find scenes that I love, and then I know that if I stick to editing, I can make the whole book like that. So that's pushing me on.