Secrets of the Tome

I’m in the thick of editing right now. I’ve spent the past week redoing some scenes. A few that I deleted and re-wrote. They were too weak. A better idea popped into my head and I decided to take the “more conflict” road. It’s more of a nail-biter that way. I also like what I decided to do with the ending. Oh, I had an idea in mind, and I went ahead and wrote it that way. Then I rewrote an earlier scene and thought: “What am I going to do with Senator Price now?” I didn’t just want to have that thread end in Act III without him doing something. So, I ended up with a scene where he shows up and makes the final scene a bigger mess than what I had before (a mess as in, all hell breaks loose).

I’m up to 106k words and it might grow some more as I tweak a few more scenes. I had to add a couple of scenes already to bridge other scenes. I still have a staggering number of TODOs that I have to attend to. Some of these are nothing more than notes that I might want to expand on something. As I go back and re-read the scenes, I sometimes decide that there is no need to expand and just get rid of my note. Other notes are fixes that I need to make. Stuff like: “So and so had his gun taken away in an earlier scene. Write it out of this scene.” Yeah, that kind of stuff happens. It really gets bad when I change one of the first scenes, causing a cascade of changes throughout the story. Those take time to fix.

I’m just gonna keep pluggin’ away…