Muaha. I am encouraged by commenters to continue this play by play editing process. I don’t even know *what* today’s goal is. Reaching page 500 seems like an extremely lofty one, given that 2 days of this has gotten me to page 275original/250new. On the other hand, I’ve passed the “I can really take big chunks out” stage, so this might go faster. Or it might go more slowly, because to cut I’m going to have to be very persnikity. I guess I’ll see.
Tag: the pretender’s crown
editing stats
I am doing something New & Strange with this revision. Typically when I’m working, I have Word’s display set to 85% of full size, and I have the style set to normal, so there are no particularly noticeable page breaks. I really loathe the print view, where each page is wholly separate. It throws off my mojo. But for this revision, that’s how I’m looking at the manuscript: one page at a time, and at 100% magnification. I actually think it’s making a significant difference. It means I’m looking at…
chaw chaw chaw
I had one of those rare moments this morning where I realized how much I love my job. Actually, that’s not so rare. It’s just that it doesn’t often hit when I’m sitting down to do revisions. I’d cleared off my desk of the last set of manuscript papers so I could spread the new ones around. For about two seconds everything was tidy, and then I put a 717 page manuscript on the left side of the keyboard tray, fifty pages of editorial cuts on the right side, and…
Gawd.
God, but THE PRETENDER’S CROWN is a big book. I’ve gone through over 300 pages now (and cut 15 or 20. I’m hoping to discover, when I read my editor’s suggestions on things to cut, that she’s got *different* places to cut from. I don’t know that I can manage to strike the 100 pages that /Jenn thinks would be ideal, but if I could get up to 50 or even *pipe dreams* 70, that would be fantastic), and I’ve just reached the enormously climactic scene that sets everything up…
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…