Of This and Other Worlds

My third round of revisions on Knife, the Hunter are DONE. It took a phone call to my editor to be sure I understood what the problems were and got some ideas on how to fix them, but once we'd talked that through, making the changes wasn't nearly as difficult as I'd feared.

In case anyone's interested in the process, here's my revision experience so far:

REVISION #1 (December '07-February '08):
Work required: Major structural and plot changes, changed main characters from adults to mid-teens
Length: Reduced from 104K to 94K
Total time to completion: Nine weeks (working 2-3 hours a day)

REVISION #2 (April '08):
Work required: Streamline and clarify plot, full line edit to fix pacing and clarity issues
Length: Reduced from 94K to 74K
Total time to completion: Three weeks (working 2-3 hours a day)

REVISION #3 (May '08):
Work required: Several additions and clarifications, minor line edits
Length: Only slightly reduced to 73K
Total time to completion: Four days (working 3-4 hours a day)

Coming up next should be copyedits, where a new editor looks at the ms. and marks it up for punctuation and grammar, while also noting continuity and fact-checking issues. And once that's done, oh glory, they'll send me galleys and I'll get to see how my story will look in actual typeset, book-quality print!

And also: *wrings hands* OUCH.

I received my second round of revisions on Knife today, with a few more suggestions for clarifying and streamlining the plot, plus line-by-line edits. The letter was six pages long, and the manuscript was marked up on nearly every page. Eep!

No, really, it's all good -- that is, I can see how all the suggestions my editor has made will play into making the book clearer and more readable, without sacrificing the elements of the book that are truly essential and/or dearest to my heart. But it's going to be a lot of work. And I only have until May 1st to get it all done -- so forgive me, dear friends, if you don't see as much of me for the next three or four weeks!

Before I go, though, I must let my yea be yea (as the apostle James would say), and give you at least a brief review of elizabethcbunce's lyrically written yet very real-feeling novel A Curse Dark as Gold.

Superficially this book is a retelling of the Rumplestiltskin legend, but in execution it's far more than that -- it's a novel of character and of family, it has the feeling of a historical novel with its seamlessly interwoven (ha) research into the craft of milling cloth, there is a strong mystery element, a well-drawn romance, and it's also a ghost story. Lots of different threads there! And yet the author weaves them all together beautifully.

The behavior of Bunce's characters is not always easy to watch -- Charlotte undergoes severe testing and struggles both externally and internally, and there were times when I wanted to grab her by both shoulders and shake her for her stubbornness -- but they are believable and consistent, and the resolution of the various character arcs feels earned rather than contrived. There's plenty of tension and action to keep the reader engaged, and the style is lovely and evocative without losing readability in the process.

And even though the major elements of the Rumplestiltskin legend remain intact, the author layers them with a story all her own and puts a fresh twist and perspective on the old fairy tale that keeps the reader in just the right amount of suspense. Well done, elizabethcbunce -- and her fabulous editor cherylklein!

As you can no doubt tell by the generally profound silence on this blog of late, I have been working very hard on my first set of editorial revisions since I got them in mid-December.*

( It's been a lot of work, but I think it's going well )

Of course, having said that, I know what's going to happen with the next set of revisions; my editor will be forced to pry the manuscript out of my hands because I want to keep fiddling with it forever, and even as it goes to copyediting I'll be running after her moaning, "But wait! I just thought of how to do X and Y so much better!"


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* For those who never tire of hearing how slow publishing is, I'll mention that the book was bought in mid-July, and that the contracts were signed in September. So yes, almost six months just to get those revisions -- but in my editor's defense, she had a lot of high-priority projects on the go, plus at the time my book wasn't scheduled until 2010.