Revisions

I got my first set of revisions yesterday. Or more to the point, I got the revision letter emailed to me. The hard copy of the manuscript in all its full red-pen glory should be waiting for me on my doorstep when I get home today.

I’ll admit I was a tad knocked for a loop when I first read it, but then, I’m not really sure what I was expecting. Okay, there’s a small part of me that was hoping I’d have a few easy edits and then I’d sail right on through. Naive, eh?

Although @SmoulderingSea put it best when I chatted with him about it. “Welcome to being published, honey.” I detect a touch of sarcasm in there, but I could be wrong. (Poor dude has become so busy lately…)

And it’s an eye-opener for sure. As an aspiring author, you hear so much about polishing up that manuscript and revising, but in the end, it’s the story and the voice of the author that really sell a book. And I think I believe that now…as “finished” as I thought the story was, there’s clearly more work to be done.

Still, I’ve got the advantage of knowing that my editor loves my work. She wants nothing but the best for the manuscript, so that takes the sting out a bit. I don’t have anything to compare the letter itself to in terms of length or details.  It was 26 pages long, though. Single-spaced. Which seems terribly overwhelming at first, although a good deal of what she called me on is details that I got sloppy with  – world-building elements that need to be solidified, scenes that need to be trimmed or moved or completely changed up. Thus far, there’s only one point I really feel I need to fight for, but I’m  going to give it a few days to roll around in my head before I go one way or the other.

The irony of it is that I had tried to smoosh some of my writing style to fit into more of a romance mold, because I thought it might sell faster – i.e. insisting on the Happily Ever After type ending, for example, even though it wasn’t something I had originally envisioned. And which now may be pulled out, or at least unraveled a bit. Which on one hand is awesome, because now I feel I can be a bit more free with aiming the story at where I wanted to go to begin with. On the other, I have to rework quite a bit of it to get there.

Small things, really. I just have to shift mental gears a bit to make it happen.