End of Editing

Edits on Inheritance of Magic #4 are nearly done!  As of today, I’m up to Chapter 19;  the book is 21 chapters long, so I can reasonably expect to be finished by the end of the weekend.

These kind of rewrite-style edits are always quite stressful to do, since I have to hold the whole book in my mind while making any changes, and it’s very common that adding something in one part of the book requires me to both add and subtract bits elsewhere.  For example, I might decide to add in a few paragraphs talking about Stephen making a new sigl in chapter 17, then as a result of that have to go forward and add in some references to the newly-expanded sigl in chapter 19, but also go back and delete the (now obsolete) references to that same sigl that I’d originally had back in chapter 15. It always feels to me rather like fiddling with a giant three-dimensional puzzle where moving one part causes knock-on effects to others, and it’s quite demanding on my memory and concentration.

Still, it’s worth the effort. I always come away from editing a book with the feeling that it’s a much better book now than it was at the first-draft stage, so even if the work is pretty demanding, I always try to do a thorough job. If I didn’t edit my manuscripts (and didn’t have to wait for my publishers) I’d be able to publish them a full year earlier, but they’d be much worse books as a result.

Next week will be the final part of the Sigl Fashion mini-series, covering all the remaining places that drucrafters wear or carry their sigls. By which point, I’ll hopefully be stuck back in to the second half of book #5!