Today (OK, yesterday) marked the Ninth full week of editing the current WIP: JADE MOON WANING.
For those of you that might be hopping on with this post, you can find Week 1 here.
I’m under 100 pages to go. This the home stretch and I’m pretty jazzed. There’s also less than a week to go in January. I’m going to push to see if I can get this done by Feb 1st.
There may be some of you out there that may be thinking, “Wow, Nine weeks and you’re still editing?”
To be honest, I’ve occasionally had that thought my own self. Especially in light of all of the award eligibility posts coming out, I find myself wondering how I could shift things in order to get even more done.
But consider:
When this is done, I’l have read the entire manuscript (all 500+ pages of it) three times! And it’s not casual reading either. One of them was an out loud read, and I don’t know about you, but that has a noticeable effect on my reading speed. This is the craft part of the process, like I mentioned before, and it’s going to take as long as it takes.
What I want you to take away from this is: Quality is favorable to quantity. When you send your work out, you want it to be the best that you can possibly make it. And that not only goes for when you’re querying agents, or editors, but all the time.
Your agent, or editor, isn’t going to care that you only complete one book a year, if what you produce is a good story that’s well-polished. That’s not to say that there won’t be additional work to do on it, but you’ll have taken it as far as you can go on your own.
Neither will your agent or editor care if you crank out three books a year if they are rife with problems, need a load of work, and are as polished as a dirt road.
Take the time that you need to take, and know that the more you do it, the more adept you will become in doing it. Which means that what might have taken you ten weeks to complete, could take you less time on the next project – Or it might take more time, no two projects are the same, but your skill level will have increased, regardless.
So I’m going to wrap this up for now. I’ve got a couple inches of snow on the ground, and five more on the way in the next day or so. You hear about life getting in the way of getting stuff done – this would be a prime example. There’s no way I’m going to be able to sit through up to 8 inches of snow without taking some time to do something about it.
Keep pushing that needle forward when you can!
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Weird Wild West
Trials
Chasing the Light
I’ll see you next week for Five-Thing Thursday!