I publicly committed to a deadline of June 30 for my editing pass, and that deadline has wooshed past. That’s the problem with arbitrary deadlines–there’s no way to tell how realistic they are.

It’s fair to say that before this point, I’ve never properly edited a novel before. Heck, it’s fair to say that even today. I’ve “edited” “drafts” before, if you consider a draft to be a 50k word NaNoWriMo lump of, shall we say, uneven quality, and you consider editing to be only a sentence-by-sentence or occasionally paragraph-by-paragraph slog. That can be a useful way to polish a manuscript, but not when there are deeper structural problems underneath.

Like with previous efforts, the end result is strikingly better than the starting point, but (even taking into account that I’m still in the midst of the editing cycle) I’m not happy with it. Not surprising, as I’m so close to the material that I couldn’t possibly hope to get an objective view of it. But even taking into account my non-objectivity and hate-of-a-thousand-suns blindness, I still have a nagging feeling that something about the story–possibly even something major and obvious–isn’t working.

This is where beta readers can be useful. I’ve done this few enough times to not have a set process. When is the right time to set a story in front of beta readers? Do you offer it to them still steaming, fresh off the shovel? Or do you wait until the piece gleams like the lapis lazuli pendant one of my characters wears? The former risks alienating your readers (and they are far too precious a resource to treat poorly). The latter risks building up such an attachment that you can’t make the needed changes. Finding the balance between the two extremes is the challenge.

I was following Holly Lisle’s One Cycle revision technique. She wisely cautions against endless revision cycles and notes that in her process, she can edit a whole novel in about two weeks. I’m going to guess that’s two weeks of full-time work. So maybe giving myself around four weeks, in the interstices between a demanding full-time job was selling myself short. Not an excuse, just an observation.

So, where did the time go? I printed the whole thing, and it came to about 480 pages in approximate Standard Manuscript Format. It took 24 days to go through the paper, neatly averaging 20 pages/day. But then the type-in–going through all the pages and deciphering the scribbles and tiny paragraphs that sprawl out of the margins and wrap around the back of pages–took a lot longer than expected. Part of it is that you get sucked in to the story, and find yourself sending time on the part of the page that doesn’t have any marks. I’m on day 10 of this pass, and near the end. Even after the type-in is done, there’s room for some polish, including the 10% Solution, but as I noted, it *might* work for that to happen in parallel with feedback from beta readers.

One other thing took an unexpected chunk of time was on the success side of the scale, but that’s the subject of a forthcoming post.

So, was it a worthwhile experience? Absolutely. Do I have plenty more work to do? Absolutely. Will I do it again? Ask me some other time. I can’t be objective about that either, right now.