I’m trying to finish…

I'm trying to finish final revisions of The Stars Change this week, so I can deliver it to Cecilia by Monday (and go back to concentrating on academia for the rest of the semester). I've gone through all the crits now (thanks, folks!) and I've done the easy fixes -- typos, small phrasing changes for clarity, etc. I love that part -- a quick sense of accomplishment, as I delete note after note, requiring almost no mental effort on my part.

I've also taken the larger crit notes and put them in one master critique file. Next (harder) step, as the kids allow, is to go through the larger notes (like, "why doesn't Captain Raj believe Gaurav? address!"), which may require re-writing entire paragraphs or longer sections, or generating new material, or cutting things (although likely not much of the latter, because I tend to write overly-lean to begin with).

If this were a short story, I'd then follow with a final step of retyping the whole damn thing, because I find that helps me keep the voice coherent and clean. For 40,000 words, with kids at home and a cold, I'm not sure if that last step will happen -- hopefully, if my hands allow and if Kev can find time to keep them for a while (he has his own deadlines), I can do that for at least part of the book. And that's the writing news from Oak Park...