I hope everyone is safe and dry after one of the wildest months of weather I can recall.
Aside from watching the weather channel and scouring twitter for suggestions of where best to send my donation dollars, I’ve been hard at work with PitchWars revisions. It’s been about two and a half weeks since PitchWars winners were announced, and I was one of the lucky few who got my edit letter right away. As I mentioned in a previous post, I didn’t read through all of it that first weekend because I wanted a little time to celebrate first, but I’ve been pretty dedicated since then.
So far it’s going REALLY well! (I think? I hope!) I’ve chatted with my mentor, Molly, a couple times but really, her edit letter and manuscript comments made so much sense right away that I haven’t had to bug her too much. I’m hoping to finish my first revision pass over the next few days and then I will send that draft back to her so she can see if I’m actually managing to do what she’s asked of me.
Thank goodness for critical readers. It’s really hard to evaluate your own writing, and since I *know* how I want the words to come across, I can’t always tell if they *do* come across that way.
For example, there was one passage in the story where the main character is telling herself that she doesn’t care about something, although she really does. My goal was to have her denial come across as pretty blatant on the page, but in effect, it did the opposite, and I just diminished the angst she was suffering. With just a few lines I potentially screwed up one of the most pivotal moments. Whoops! So I had to fix that, clearly.
In numbers, I trimmed about 1000 words, mostly from a subplot that didn’t need to be there, and added 8000 new words, which hopefully provide needed context that will propel the story forward and help readers become more emotionally invested.
The wild part is that I haven’t really changed much of the story itself, but it feels SO different. With Molly’s encouragement I let myself dive deeper into some of the relationships in this story and it’s been like uncovering scenes that were there in the background, all along. Like my own “bonus material.” And now the scenes I’d written previously will hopefully feel deeper and more grounded for readers.
And with that, it’s back to the grindstone for me!