I’ve been calling my current WIP project “editing”, which doesn’t do full justice to the scale of what I was doing. Draft #4 of my strange story about machines and monsters cut around 45,000 words from a 90,000 word draft, working fairly solidly from the 3rd of March to the 30th of June. AND NOW IT’S DONE. I’M FREEEEE.

It was a massive, massive rewrite, and here’s some things I learned from it.

Getting Started is Always the Hardest

This Twitter exchange says it better than I ever could:

It takes me 5 times longer to edit the first 50 pages than the rest of the book.

— Victoria Schwab (@veschwab) May 22, 2015

@veschwab I think a) because the first pages were when you were finding your feet during the writing so they need more correction and…

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) May 22, 2015

@veschwab b) because they’re when you’re first switching gears in terms of editing so they take more time to get used to it?

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) May 22, 2015

~ @veschwab Writing and editing are like running through a new house in the dark. With time, your eyes adjust and you run faster through. — Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) May 22, 2015

Looking back at my word-count and editing stats for the months, I can really see it in action, too: in between a lot of real-life stuff, the first 25% of the edit took me two months. After all that, the rush to 100% was break-neck speed by comparison.

Editing Burn-Out is REAL
(oh jeez it’s so real)

Let’s hope I never have to do two major rewrites of the same book in a row again. Switching gears for half a year is really rough going. I’m looking forward to getting back to drafting.

Accountability Matters

During tricky rewrites, I show up everywhere wanting to keep a pedantic track of my wordcount — I keep a daily wordcount and editing pagecount spreadsheet, I tell Twitter, I tell my writing friends by e-mail, I give updates to a writing forum, I do my Writing Wednesday posts and fiddle about with tracking bars on the blog.

I like being able to prove, in cold hard figures, that I’m not stuck in a rut. I’m moving closer to the end.

I kill all my procrastination demons with spreadsheets.

Perfectionism is the Mind Killer

I’m getting better at spotting when I’m just tooling with a story, wasting time trying to get it to the impossible “perfect” point, and need to just stop and send it out to people.

All in all, it’s been… weirdly fun, in the end. I was miserable in the first month of this rewrite, the slow start, but now I’m at the end I feel weirdly proud of the new-and-improved project. This will fade in time, but for now, I’m going to bask in it.

Now that I’ve finally got some free time, here’s what I’m going to do:

• Send the story out to the lovely beta reader team.
• Catch up on my reading
• Catch up on two beta reading projects for very patient friends.
• Tidy the living daylights out of my poor, neglected study.
• Go to the cinema and see Mad Max!
• Play some video games.
• Start catching up on the TV backlog.
• And, of course, start on the next shiny new project!

How are things going in your neck of the woods, readers? Writing anything? Reading anything? Watching Mad Max before me? Leave a comment and let me know!