It probably helps that I'm new to trying to write something that is, well, decent. I'm learning a lot as I go. It makes things more interesting.

And I tend to self-edit as I go, which is ... good and bad.

This is also me.

Although I will say, I am slashing and burning through the darlings with abandon at the moment. I can be rather ruthless when I set my mind to it. I've added something like two thousand new words, but right now, I only have a net gain of about five hundred words, if that tell you anything.

I'm on revision chapter 4. My wife convinced me to put in a new chapter break so revision chapter 1 has been split into two chapters. Then I finished the revision chapter 3 in which I used two paragraphs from the rough draft, yay! One of them had to be reworded though.

I'm rocking revision chapter 4 now. I've actually been able to cut and paste a fair amount of stuff in from draft chapter 2. I usually need to do a bit of rewording but it's still faster than generating all new stuff.

Revision chapter 5 will be all new, but then I'll hit revision chapter 6 and that should pretty much just be smoothing out stuff from the draft.

This puts me at around 6,000 words in the revision. At the same position of the story in the draft I had around 8,000 words.

Forty-five pages/12.5K words to go on this revision.

Unless, of course, I go bonkers and decide to start over at the beginning again. I just so want this to be as good as it can possibly be.

All right-- final push.

Good luck with the final push.

When you're done with this round, Barb, I would really let it rest at least a couple of days before you consider going through again. You're not going to have any perspective if you jump right back in, you know?

I may not even do that, Amy-- I may just shove it into email to my agent because if I know someone else has it, I'll be able to resist temptation to tinker even further. I mean, all she had wanted in the first place were some small fixes here and there, but given the time of year and the fact that I really hadn't gone through it with a fine-tooth comb in over a year, I decided to go ahead and go whole hog with it.

But I know I have to let it go, because if it does get bought, that's going to be at least one more revision pass if not more, so I have to keep that in mind.

Now that I think about the rocking on chapter four may slow down the next time I work on it. I have a metric buttload of backstory in the draft coming up immediately. I have to pare down everything I can get away with.

Thirty-five pages to go and one of my characters is just absolutely breaking my heart.

WAAAAHHHHHHH

I just found a typo. It should be 'The man gave Martin a bow' not 'The man gave Martin a blow'. Boy, one letter makes a big difference.