This week was spent mostly recovering from a cold that I picked up last week, when I was on holiday time from work, and editing my vampire romance novel, Forbidden Blood. I’m feeling much better now but still a little throaty at times. Work has been very stressful this week so writing has been a glorious escape from that.
I’ve made it a good distance into the second draft of Forbidden Blood. It’s slow progress to go through a 121,000 word story and tighten it all. So far, I’ve brought it down to around 117,000 words, which is pretty good, and I’m on target for it to end up around the 110,000 word mark, which should give it a better chance with literary agents looking for paranormal / vampire romance fiction. Husband dearest keeps saying that I’m hacking my story but I gently argue that it isn’t hacking. All I’m doing it clearing out the clutter and sharpening the sentences so it reads better and the writing is far tighter. I can get repetitive at times, and usually catch it during this stage, which is why I cut back on so many words.
The initial read through on paper, acting as a reader not an editor or author, really helps spot the repetition and things that need improvement. Thankfully with this one there’s not too much that needs to be deeply addressed. It’s mostly things like improving scenes and clarifying and writing parts a little tighter.
For once, I’m actually enjoying editing. I usually approach these things with much depression and complete lack of enthusiasm, but it’s fun to watch the word count go down and to be strict.
I think over the five years that I have been writing original fiction, I have slowly become far more professional in my approach to not only writing but editing too. I can now accept that it’s a very necessary part of writing and I won’t let anyone see a story that is only in first draft really, at least no in its entirety. My friend Maria gets snippets from time to time when I’m uncertain of things or we’re sharing stuff. I am usually happy with a first draft, but I write it so fast that I need to give it a hard going over when I’m doing the second draft.
Still, I’m a week in, and over 100 pages out of 270 edited. I should have this done in around four week I think, so three weeks from now.
I’m redesigning my site at the moment, so I’d better get back to that. On an aside, I went to see Alice in Wonderland in 3D yesterday with the hubby and that was really good. I’d definitely buy it on DVD. The 3D wasn’t as impressive as it was on Avatar though. Really expensive to see it too. Almost 20 quid!
I also watched Underworld: Rise of the Lycans last night on Sky and I have to say it didn’t exactly blow me away. You can tell it’s a cheap take on the other two Underworld films. Not enough vampire-ness even when they were surrounded by them. I mostly sat there thinking a lot of my stories would make far better films.
