The self editing phase of my paranormal romance novel, codenamed Arcadian, is well underway now.

Last weekend I gave it a first read through on paper. It reads well and I enjoyed it, devoured it, couldn’t put the damn thing down (hubby was very understanding), but I spotted things that needed changing and words that I overused. I’ve spent the week having a good think about that read through and doing basic grammar and spelling checks, and putting together a running outline of the story. The more I think about it, the more I start to gain perspective and figure out what needs to change.

I don’t think anything needs to change with the plot but I might up the tension and flesh out the bad guy more. The characters are all pretty good at this stage. I have a few things to address with the hero and heroine, but that’s mostly repetition of feelings and thoughts rather than them as characters.

I have also found a few scenes that could be cut down to increase the pace and drop the word count.

All this means that I now have a list of stuff to work on in this second draft phase that is as long as my arm (excuse the cliche). I have allowed 5 weeks in my schedule, 4 remaining after this week, but I might give myself more time so I don’t feel pressured and can work on this one properly.

Today I tested how long it would take me to sit down and give the story a thorough going over, cutting out unnecessary words, phrasing things better, and looking out for repetition (as well as too many ‘-ing’ and ‘as’ sentences). I did it on one chapter and it took an hour and a quarter. I did a second chapter and again it took an hour and a quarter. There are 34 chapters in this story. That’s 42.5 hours to do this kind of edit. I only get 3 hours a day to work on the story (if I’m lucky, and if I don’t do any Japanese), which means that it’s going to take me roughly 15 days to edit the story this way once I’ve fixed up the things I’ve noted down to address. Phew! Three weeks solid work only inching forwards 2 chapters a day is going to be hard, but it will be worth it. I might have to break off and do other things sometimes just to keep sane 🙂

My trimming and hard work on these two chapters cut out 644 words though. If I cut out 300 words per chapter on average, it’s going to chop a much needed 10,200 words off this story. That will bring it close to 120,000. That would make me very happy indeed! I think the story would benefit from having the pace increased to that extent.

It will be hard work though. Time to adjust my writing schedule again! I might just have to free up my time until end of May. Thankfully I’m in a position where I can focus on editing this and getting a good second draft done.

Well, now I need to crack on with finishing the new look for my website. Lots of work still to do on that. I can’t wait to get phase one of it done so I can get it off my mind for a month or so.

My archery class has finished too so I don’t have that to keep my stress-free now. I’m trying to join a local club but no word yet. I really want to continue with archery. I was doing quite well at it considering that we only had 9 hours in total lesson time.

It’s my birthday on Tuesday. I have Monday and Tuesday off, but will likely work most of the time I have off work. I want to finish this website and get moving on the edits for Arcadian.

I’ll keep everyone posted on my progress!

F