just doin’ the job

So I got revision notes on THE PRETENDER’S CROWN from my agent, the estimable /Jennifer Jackson a couple of days ago. The first screen (which was all I read at the time) wasn’t too terrible (I have gotten *really* gun-shy about revision letters since the one that obliged me to *completely* rewrite HOUSE OF CARDS), so today I held my breath and looked at the rest of it.

Really not dreadful at all, except perhaps for the part where she said, “Around page 250 I thought, hm, this is slow getting started. I think, ideally, you might cut about 100 pages from the first chunk and then we’d really have something.”

This is essentially what she said about HEART OF STONE. (Actually, there, she said, “Here, rewrite this completely,” then read the rewrites and said, “Great! Now cut another 30 pages from the first 100, and we’ll really have something.”) And she was right.

I suspect she’s right about this, too. She had a couple of bits where she specifically said, “I think this part went on too long,” which is *insanely* helpful from an editing point of view. Just a “here, look at this part” makes it *so* much easier for me to suddenly go oh, oh, yeah, okay, I can see how that could get cropped down. So now I’m actually all excited about the book again, and looking forward to trying to tackle that behemoth. Which means I must be all excited about writing this Walker Papers book, because it would be good to have it done before I have to turn my attention to TPC. And strangely enough, it kinda works. I’m feeling zingier about writing, and that’s always good.

Days like today, this job doesn’t suck. Yay!