Greetings from the cave! 

As November trudges on, I'm finding that I'm missing NaNo a little. So I decided to post a bit on my novel. While I have been posting occasional updates in other posts, there hasn't been a post specifically about TWR since...March. And a very very long time has elapsed since then.

So, what exactly IS going on with TWR?

Well...

I've only made it through a quarter of the book in terms of edits. 

Which is much less than I thought I would have after a full year (YES A YEAR) after I received my editor's feedback. 

There are, of course, many factors playing into this (graduate school, YAG, etc.) But the one that I want to focus on is how my editor's feedback has significantly affected the speed of my editing. 

When choosing my editor, I focused on trying to find someone who could be respectful of my Catholic ideals and with who I could build a relationship with and one willing to help me make this novel the best it could be. So much so, that I missed a few red flags. Like the one that apparently my editor focuses on line editing rather than developmental edits. 

So instead of getting constructive developmental edits, I ended up getting a whole package with content AND line edits. 

At first, I was kind of excited for that, for then I thought that once I get through all of that, it would be done. What I found instead is that a full edit project on a 120k novel was very dense and very overwhelming. 

The advice I was given by my editor was to focus on the line edits first and then do the plot edits as I go and even later. Which went against every single grain of my instinct. For why would I waste time doing little edits on a piece that I'm going to cut?? 

After doing a little bit, I got what she was saying and it did help some. But, in the line edits were many stylistic "suggestions" that didn't sit well with me. I have said previously that my editor suggested cutting out all the "flowery" passages in TWR. But also among her suggestions were also the elimination of "old-fashioned" speech to try to keep speech patterns consistent throughout the novel (while trying not to sacrifice character uniqueness). 

Unfortunately, these two ideals often butted heads. For example, my betas will remember that my character Karsten is a rather...flowery individual. So cutting out all his flowery language would literally take away all his charm...something that I wasn't willing to do. 

This happened quite often, and so I would often get caught in the weeds. Frustration with my manuscript AND my editor would often rise. As I went through my manuscript, I also found evidence of miscommunications between my editor and myself, which frustrated me further. The relationship that I had hoped to form also never materialized, which was hugely disappointing.  

At present, I am going through chapter by chapter, line by line, fixing what I can. I have a huge list of scene ideas. My editor suggested that I should reduce the POVs down to three, which eliminates the omniscent-ness of the work. In some ways, I'm rather relieved because there were some rather troublesome subplots that needed to go...but I miss the overall tone and I hope that it won't detract from the charm of the original story. My betas have been great helps to me as I try to navigate all of this mess. 

In short, I found that my post-editor experience was mixed. I do believe that her feedback will greatly improve the manuscript, but I need to find a way to speed up the process. I had hoped that I could publish this book by next winter, but that is clearly not happening. 

Those of you who have been through this process before, how did you handle it? I would dearly love advice! 

Scribbingly yours, 

Catherine