I was on vacation this past week. Nothing exotic. The living room table -- my wife's "branch office" as she likes to call it -- where my laptop lay waiting. I had two goals for the week: get a good head of steam on editing my novel, and run at least twenty miles. The running was relatively easy (as of Saturday -- with my long run still to come -- I've already got 19.2 miles under the waistband of my sweatpants). While I've not yet completed the edit (nor did I expect to in a week), so far I've gone through the first 280 or so pages of what was the second draft (of 350 pages) and culled it to about 230. At this point, I expect the third draft to weigh in at less than 300 pages. My wife's amazed. She might even read it this time!
Her inability to get past page 110 or so was actually quite helpful, as was the inability of one of my brothers to get that far. I figure I can expect about 50-60 pages from these folks out of love and family. But if they can't finish it, I can't expect anyone else to either -- especially an agent. The key is listening to my early readers and finding out why they couldn't get farther. It turns out that all the well-written character development didn't move the story along as well as I'd thought. So, much of it went bye-bye. Indeed, of the first four or five chapters, I retained two scenes, both used as backstory -- one of them much deeper in the book.
It's still not perfect. I had to add a scene, but as I was jogging yesterday I ruminated over the new scene. I'm not sure it works, and I'll need to re-read it. The two-year anniversary of my initial completion of the novel is just a little more than a week away. That is my goal: have the new edit done by that date. I won't need to take another vacation to do it, but I must say it's been one of the most satisfying vacations in my adult life.
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