Once upon a time, said she, I loved editing. Or not so much loved, perhaps. You see, when you’re writing a book you don’t particularly want to write right then, it helps to have a semi-solid base to layer the frosting on.

Oh, it wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to do the book as such. The problem of working for traditional publishing is that your schedule is subsumed by theirs. The way it works is, you’re burning up to write a book, you write the first three chapters and a detailed (mine were usually 50 pages) outline, which means at that point you’ve done the most significant work on the book, the characters are live, and you want to finish it.

Then you sent it off to your agent, who usually sent it off to a batch of houses… (Or not. I had an amazing number who set on it, which led to only selling three agents later. Anyway–)

The shortest time between proposal and sale for me was about 3 months. The longest was 12 years.

In either case, it was a problem — though the first OBVIOUSLY — much less.

You see, books aren’t things of ideas and intellect only. Not fiction books. And not for me. They’re also things of emotion, of where you are at that moment as a person and a writer, of how you relate to the characters, etc.

Even three months can break that, though it will take either a traumatic experience or writing a very significant work in those three months. Twelve years will break that. You’re simply not the same person who wrote the proposal. That trilogy, the highest paid I ever worked on — and we’re working on bringing it out, though it’s one of those both sides will throw knives at me for. At least this time it will be the Author’s cut, which is less obnoxious — almost drove me insane. I kept raging at the twit who’d written that outline. Twelve years change you, and those twelve years bridged 9/11, which when you’re talking about an historical travel trilogy, makes a big difference.

Anyway, it was how the job was, and the way it was done. Not the same now, of course.

So I loved to revise. Because at that point the words were down to more or less the desired length. (I’m a putter inner, so every book grew by 20k words) so now is when I could sit down and think it over, and fix the bits that bugged the living daylights out of me, or smooth out the wording, or whatever. It’s where the book went from meh to as good as I could make it.

Then…. Then came a very weird period where the “proposal” I was selling on was half a page — or in one case, a paragraph — saying “I think I’ll do this.” And the answer came either that day or within a couple of days.

So I didn’t have the displacement. I sat down and wrote the book. In those circumstances, editing the first draft became the boring part. I was just looking for places I didn’t quite foreshadow write, the dialogue felt stilted, a character grew an extra arm. (Scarily easy to do. Also how I know I’m not a character. The number of times I stood outside the door, a kid by each hand, and desperately wanting to grow a third arm to unlock the door.)

I’ve written indie books since then, but more or less by that method. Write in a blazing hot streak, then do the boring revise. Then send it out.

It’s curious, now I am revising No Man’s Land, to find myself going back to enjoying it. And also being mildly frustrated at how much I left out (and mildly scared. It’s 212 thousand words and change.) And how some character stuff is only obvious now. As in “Oh, so that’s why–“

Part of it is that I’m writing in my first world. No. My first, first world, from when I was 14. Fourteen year olds don’t necessarily build worlds that make a ton of sense. You write into the cool. But the world stayed alive all these years, so I wrote it, and now I’m making the sense out of it.

Part of it is that I’m not using the characters I used the, but moved the whole thing 500 years forward on their timeline. Partly because I realized some time ago I needed an earth-like character pov. Partly because no one can make sense of what I started with. Not even I.

Correction: It might make sense if I wrote it as a prequel, with less burden of explanation. Meh. If this sells bazillions, I’ll consider it.

Anyway, writing it was a labor of Hercules. Particularly since this year has been what it’s been, between bursting water mains, and flooded basements, and a kid getting married.

I actually started to write the book 5 years ago, but 2020 and moving and– So, here we are. The bulk of it was written in the last six months, but even so, it’s a long time. (Which is why I prefer not to write only a chapter a day. If you do 10k words a day…. okay, so I didn’t, because life.

Which means that editing is where I’m bringing the book together and taking meh and wait what to hopefully great though it might only ever graze good, who knows?

What am I finding? The usual I am horrible with numbers, locations and details. So I’m fixing a lot of that as I go along.

But mostly, one of those magical things that used to happen in revision happened. I had a few awkward psychological turns, and a few things that I went “Wait, what? Why is he doing that?” Well, the puzzle clicked in revision. It means leaking a few thing in here and there to make the puzzle click right for the reader. The change is not great, but it makes a lot more sense. This makes me happy.

Now to do it all in the next two days, so that it can be in my editor’s hands when I leave for Portugal next week.