Well, cover letter is getting proofed by my editor, synopsis is ready to print, manuscript ready to print, envelope addressed……… and yes, here we go, the first mailing goes out today to a literary agency.
Having a developmental editor going over my manuscript since March of this year, after having spent countless weeks and months drafting the book, and scrubbing and rescrubbing the book, again and again until we can’t at least at this moment find anything else we can alter or correct, it is easily, without any doubt, the most intensely written prose I’ve ever worked on.
I’ve learned an enormous amount. And, by the way, if you are writing a novel? I’d recommend not being too fussy about the first chapter in the initial phase as you’ll have to go back and refine and foreshadow much of what is hardly imagined once you’ve plunged into the body of the book.
I spent weeks on a first drafting of the first chapter years ago now and much of that effort and prose has been so substantially altered it was somewhat of a waste of time. I ought to have got on with the thing.
My unedited manuscript came in at 256 thousand words, the novel is now down to 157 thousand words, and that doesn’t count all the countless other pages that were part of revising and part of the initial drafts… Of the 157k that remain, some 25 thousand of those words have been studied, altered, revised, changed, and contemplated until everyone involved has had their heads nearly explode from the thing. What a process. On to the next challenge!
