Valor of the Healer

About 200 words tonight killed in Chapter 21. Page count of that chapter went down another page from 28 to 27. Biggest edit: deleted an entire paragraph in which I rather fancied the imagery but in which I had to make myself realize that actually, it didn’t really need to be there.

There’s another six pages or so that I haven’t scanned through yet in this chapter, and I don’t know yet what this means in terms of how many more words I’ll be able to kill from it. Another couple of hundred, if I’m lucky; a net loss of 600 or so on the chapter feels kind of light to get me to the goal, though.

We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

Edited tonight: -204
Chapter 21 revised total: 6,484
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,721

… I emailed agent Diana Fox, who y’all may remember I last approached this past fall regarding Lament, to ask her whether it’s still okay for me to submit the revised version of the manuscript to her for consideration. She says yes.

This means I am now setting myself the goal to not only finish the edit pass on the fourth draft but also get it beta-read before , , and I head to Disneyland on the 9th. I have four more chapters and an epilogue to finish editing, and thankfully at this point, I think I’ve passed all the bits that need major surgery. So it should be down to a question of word count reduction.

Y’all consider this an early warning then that I’m going to need a beta reader or three to sanity-check this thing for me before I fire it off at Ms. Fox. The level of effort required here would simply be to read over the manuscript and make sure it hangs together coherently–since I’ll have killed 20,000 words out of it, and in some places significantly tweaked events, I’ll need to make sure all of these changes have made it an overall leaner and meaner story. Significant tweaking in particular has been done with Faanshi’s portrayal, trying to strengthen her as a character, and I need to make sure that works too.

General proofreading will also be welcome but not required.

So if anybody thinks they may have free cycles in the week or so before July 9th and will have time to chug through about 117K worth of novel, let me know!

Started digging into Chapter 21 tonight as planned. The results of tonight’s efforts: 200-some-odd eliminated words, which so far makes up for the extra words added to Chapter 20. And I think I killed about a page and a half all told; the file started at 29 pages, and now I’m down to 28, and page 28 is only about half full. I hit page 13 before I decided it was bedtime.

This’ll do. We’ll see if I can kill a couple more hundred words in this chapter before I hit the end.

Edited tonight: -203
Chapter 21 revised total: 6,688
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,925

Apparently I need to wander off to Canada more often, if it means I can actually finish up a chapter. Did a little bit of poking at Chapter 20 of Lament on Thursday night, more yesterday morning in Vancouver, and a bit more tonight–and realized that yeah, I was ready to go on ahead to the end of the file.

So this means the fourth draft of Chapter 20 is finally done. The biggest change to this turned out to be pulling a bit of interaction between Kirinil and Faanshi out of a previous version of Chapter 17, since I wanted that here for Kirinil generally magically checking Faanshi out.

And this means that at last, I can move on to Chapter 21. And hopefully pick up some serious speed with the editing. Chapter 21 is a Kestar chapter and I don’t plan any major edits here, so it should all be word count reduction.

Let’s see if I can get that chapter finished off by the end of the week. It’d be nice, too, if I can finish the edit pass by the time I’m ready to go to Disneyland.

Edited since Thursday: -69
Chapter 20 revised total: 4,733
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 122,128

A couple more pages of Chapter 20 tonight, even though it felt like pulling teeth to do it. I’ve finally reached the part of the chapter where a bit I’d previously excised from Chapter 17 needs to come back in–so I’ve had a sudden jump in word count, to the tune of a few hundred words. This is, as I’ve said before, the wrong direction.

But I’m hoping I’ll be able to make up for it once I finish slogging through this chapter and get into Chapter 21, where I can hopefully do some serious verbiage reduction.

But I think a few pages tonight is all I’m up for. More tomorrow. She hopes.

Edited tonight: +256
Chapter 20 revised total: 4,802
Lament of the Dove revised total: 122,197