I literally only made two posts in March, one relating my February thinks to done and the other, halfway through the month, explaining my otherwise total radio silence. Now, for the March thinks to done post, I explain the REST of the radio silence. I mean, like, man, I even went to movies! But I didn’t picoreview any of them because I was too goddamn busy!
In March I did a much deeper-dive revision on THE CARDINAL RULE than I expected to. I mean, I’d gone in with the vague intention to Honor The Writer I’d Been and make as few changes as possible. That lasted to the beginning of the first sentence, after which it was clear that NOPE NEWP FIXING THAT WHEE ZOOM THROW THAT AWAY AND MAKE THAT BETTER was actually the name of the game. If I’m understanding the ‘compare documents’ thing I did correctly, there are 6727 lines in the manuscript, and nearly 6000 changes. Almost every paragraph has been touched. Hell, almost every *sentence* has been touched. Entire scenes have been added and clunky parts have been removed.
And yet: the changes should be just about completely transparent to you, the reader. Nothing about the book’s plot has changed at all. There’s one word that couldn’t have been in the book in 2005, when the original edition was published, but aside from that one word, I don’t think that, unless you’ve either read the original dozens of times or read the two books side by side, you’ll see the differences. So that took two VERY SOLID WEEKS of work and I confess I’m really, really pleased with the effort. The book is about 4000 words longer than it was, but I cut at least that much, too, so I’d say there’s probably 10K of (completely invisible, I think) new content in it. It was a hell of a project but I’m super happy with it and can’t wait for it to come out TOMORROW for EVERYONE TO READ!!!
Frankly, that would have been enough Thinks To Done in March. That was big work. However, I also:
– prepped it for publication
– did final edits & revisions for STONEMASTER
– prepped IT for publication
– fulfilled the bulk of the STONEMASTER kickstarter
– wrote a 12K word book proposal
– wrote a 10K word book proposal
– wrote about 20 pages of screenplay
– revised a couple of other proposals
– wrote a little 1500 word thing for my patreon
– went as far as I could in restoring my newsletter that i accidentally deleted all of *cries*
– moved MAGIC & MANNERS from one host to another, a thing I’ve been meaning to do for 2+ years
– flew to liverpool to see Captain Marvel with a friend :)
– and a fug-ton of other administrative/daily life kinds of things that I won’t recount here but yeah I did a *lot* in March.
But it’s okay, because now that I’ve gotten through it, April is almost as busy! O.O
Next time one of my editing clients grumps about best they can do at the time vs best they can do, I very well may point them at this post. This is SUCH a common author experience (Tamora PIerce, Diane Duane, Neil Gaiman, all do the same thing! I’m basically convinced that ALL authors have this impulse. Nothing is EVER perfect. You learn, and all you can do is put it out into the world when it’s the best you can do AT THAT TIME.
Oh, absolutely. And most of the time I’m content to leave things as they are. These books get the Revision Process because they weren’t widely read to begin with, there were length constraints that I always wanted to push behind, and they were written very very quickly a long long time ago, so I felt like I could justify reworking them. But they were absolutely what I could do at the time, and that’s fine. :)