That’s a trick post title, I’m not going to lie. Editing is hard work, plus it’s a long and involved process. But I won’t bemoan it here. 😉

Instead I’m celebrating passing the halfway mark in editing the first book in my Depths of Memory series. Woot!

This is a final (read, 7th edit), pre-query edit for the book, before I send it off to my publisher and ask, pretty please ma’am, is it to your liking? If not, I’ll have to seek other venues and that’s always a nail-biter. I’ve done my best to remove things she finds tedious along the way. She’s got a long list, and why not be proactive, after all?

This edit has been particularly grueling as I’m dealing with word count restrictions in the indie publishing world. This means I can’t go beyond 110k per book in this series, if I hope to stay with the same publisher, or most indie pubs. So I’ve restructured things and taken out some content and moved it into the second book (basically one of the character’s story lines), and that helped a bit. Even then, I was left with 140k words for this segment, and this simply would not do for indie, despite the book being sci-fi. Whoopsie? I believe in the process I’ve murdered some darlings, among other things, like siphoned off excess verbosity and other crap.

So, I continue to condense, refine, and toss out anything that doesn’t add value. My hope is the end product will be harder hitting and deliver more bang for the buck, but only my preview readers will be able to tell me what they think of the before and after copies.

This is an extremely good lesson in keeping things short and to the point on the future installments as I finish writing them. And in knowing not just your audience, as in the readers, but also, the buying publishing house.

Next…more about the Depths of Memory series, or why I’m bothering editing these for your future reading pleasure.