Purgatory Is An Unedited Manuscript

Anyone who follows my ranting and moaning on Twitter knows that I’ve spent the better part of a week now looking at edits for Unacceptable Risk, ignoring edits for Unacceptable Risk, procrastinating in order to avoid looking at edits for Unacceptable Risk, and occasionally, in rare fits of productivity actually working on edits for Unacceptable Risk.
(Unacceptable Risk being the new m/f cyberpunk romance I contracted with Samhain Publishing, coming to an eReader near you this winter!)
A lot of this hand-wringing has involved going through little stylistic issues. Do I really need the ‘that’ in that sentence? Is a ‘dangling modifier’ really just an opportunity for a TWSS joke? Could I start any more sentences with conjunctions?
Some of it is content. My editor wanted to see some adjustments to one of the character arcs, and while I completely agree with her analysis and suggestions, actually making the changes has given me heart palpitations. Will the new stuff suck? Will it stick out like a sore thumb? Am I overthinking everything?
And some of it … some of it is just plain sitting there shaking my head at myself. Everything that seemed brilliant six months ago is a lot easier to look at now with a healthy dose of bitchbrow. I still love the story, but did I really not notice that I started six sentences in a row with the same basic phrasing? Did I not see that I used the word ‘back’ five times in two paragraphs?
Seriously.
Anyway, the good news is that I’m mostly done. I still need to take one last pass through to make sure the edits flow and I haven’t made too many new problems while trying to solve old ones.
But I will be so, so, so excited to leave the purgatory of editing to return to the welcome, familiar hell of writing from scratch.

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