rj_anderson | I has a title! And a revision update

The Powers that Be have spoken, and bestowed upon me my final book title, as well as the title for the whole series (which may have the potential to grow into more than two books, if all goes well):

The series will be called Faery Rebels (trust me, it actually does fit), and the title for Book One is Knife, the Hunter. Though I plan to go on calling it Knife out of sheer habit, not to mention brevity.

As of last week I've finished my second round of revisions, which was just as intense in some ways as the first round, but only took half as much time. Either I'm getting better at this, or the book is getting better -- I hope both. But it may interest some of you to know that between those two revisions the book has ended up being shorter by 30,000 words -- bringing it down from the original 104K to a much more standard 74K.

And you know what? I don't actually miss any of those 30,000 words. I always thought that to cut that much I would have to take out at least some things that really mattered to the characters and the story, but now that I look at it again, all I see is a much tighter, cleaner, quicker-moving story that still has all the things I really care about... and some exciting new things I never imagined until these two revisions, but which make a lot more sense than the stuff I had in there before.

I know some of my fellow writers are going to want to beat me to death with their keyboards for this, but it's the truth: I love revision.

Which is good, because I'm still not sure that my editor won't want me to do some more of it before all's done...