Now this has been a truly crazy week. I finished the Con Shirt edit on Sunday and started immediately into an edit of Selkie, which is now renamed From the Sea. This novel is one that’s very close to me, being based on my favorite Celtic mythology song, The Great Selkie. However, staying mostly true to the song, at least to the big moments, and keeping the reader with me has been an ongoing difficulty. I lost one reader, whether to the fact that the story turned out more literary than paranormal romance or because it was just too rough a draft neither she nor I will probably know for sure. However, this meant that I needed to find more readers, which didn’t prove that difficult. Except that I did have one partial feedback and one full feedback already.

So in my grand wisdom, I decided to do another quick edit pass based specifically on the comments. Only I had to finish Con Shirt first. Oh, and to control my habit of doing anything that meant progress besides editing something to final, I have established a drop dead, unchangeable no matter what, deadline of 2/16/08 to start on the next (and maybe even final) edit of Kyrnie or Shadows of the Sun.

What that meant, quite simply, is that I had to edit Selkie this week and before Saturday.

*GULP*

Amazingly enough, I succeeded. I’ve never been so focused or consistent in my life. Between the two crit versions and some notes of my own, I edited (by jumping from comment to comment) over 200k in two days. Then the next morning I wrote a new scene from scratch, edited it a couple times, and declared it done for this pass.

I did not actually succeed in my aims with this or Con Shirt, but I came really darn close. Both still need a spell check before they can go out to those who are waiting for them. But I think I can legitimately do that step while taking a break from Kyrnie. It’s not like it’s anything but mechanical, right?

On Selkie itself, I still find the story powerful and get wrapped up in it. I know there are probably things I failed to see, things that my love of the story glossed over, but I’ve corrected everything that I could based on the feedback and who knows, maybe this one will manage to get out the door this year as well. It would be nice considering I managed nothing new last year.