I know I’ve been horrible about updating, but life happened and kept me from editing as well as posting. However, in the short week that ended April, I pushed everything else away and dove in head first. Though I blew my initial goal of May 1st to get the edit done, I’m on target and looking good for the backup date of May 15th. The edit is going well, and getting easier as I go along. I’d forgotten the critter comment that the second half was much stronger, but I’m loving that fact now. There are still some big fixes that need to be done, and a whole new scene that must be written, but the number of “guess I have to rewrite this scene from scratch” instances have gone way down.
What’s even more important is that I still love and believe in this story. Kyrnie’s had a rocky road, but I think this time she’ll actually be ready for the big time.
Oh, and the biggest change? When I first wrote Shadows, I got it into my head that books should be around 30 chapters. I think it happened by accident at first, but then grew into tradition over the course of 2-3 books. With Shadows clocking in at 135k, those 35 chapters were pretty hefty. One of the tasks I’ve undertaken this time is to trim the average chapter length down, to go for punchy rather than jamming scenes together to stay within the realm of 30 chapters (which I didn’t succeed at anyway). Currently there are 39 chapters and I’m in the middle of what was once chapter 28. My largest chapter went from 5314 to 4123 and my average from 3805 to 2672. The smallest, however, went from 2220 to 1313. But I think it’s working better that way :). No one sentence chapters for me as of yet.
And stats:
Edited Today: 10,138 words
39 Chapters complete – 81% of the novel
-4 Chapters remain
25,303 Remaining word count
106,890 Current Total
135,543 Predicted Total