Schrodinger’s edits

The final round of edits have been completed and submitted to my agent. Or have they? How do I know they’re the final round of edits? My agent may want more edits. The only way I’ll know if they’re the final round of edits is if I get more edits back. Or not.

See? Philosophy and writer stuff in one handy blog.

But I have sent in the final (latest) round of edits back, on Friday in fact. But today is the first time I’ve had energy to turn on the laptop, so today you’re getting the round-up blog.

How was it? Tough. You may be noticing a common theme here from the last time I talked about edits. The final third of the novel is where all the big battles are, so I spent nearly a week just writing fight scenes, death scenes, inventing ways to kill people. TO ANYONE WHO COULD BE MONITORING MY COMPUTER OR BLOG, I’M TALKING ABOUT A NOVEL, BY THE WAY.  It got really exhausting towards the end, emotionally draining. I’m hoping that that doesn’t come through in the novel. The last thing I want to do is put off people who’ve read two thirds of it but then find the ending too unpalatable.

There was also a very unexpected main character death. A character who isn’t supposed to die, not anywhere in the trilogy, suddenly dies at the end of book 1. That really surprised me, but the more I wrote, the more I could see it coming. I had to do a lot of thinking to work out whether the plot arcs for the next two books could be adapted to accommodate the lack of that character. The good news is they can, but my next task is to rewrite my outlines to reflect that, so that’s when I’ll get the final confirmation that they’ll work without this person. That’s this week’s task, while Harry reads the latest version of Godblind and hopefully accepts every change I’ve made without demur. Of course, if he comes back with more queries, I’ll do more work. That’s the nature of the beast.

I know Harry has been working on the synopsis and the pitch for Godblind as well. I’m starting to get the feeling that this isn’t some delicious dream but may actually be real. It’s still quite surreal to think that, potentially, in just a few weeks it will be out on submission with publishers in the UK and abroad. 0_0

Currently reading: Blood Song, Anthony Ryan

Currently watching: GoT season 6 (I don’t care what anyone says, he’s not dead)

Currently listening: Blackstar, David Bowie