Mom Wars is almost ready!
It wasn't easy revising while my daughter was home sick with croup, but I stayed up late every night and believe Mom Wars is in amazing shape. Wahoo! But...I'm still not sure it's bullet proof enough to start submitting. I printed up the full and handed it to my amazing mentor, Joyce Sweeney, yesterday, and can't wait to hear what she thinks! I know she loves the manuscript from comments she's made while I ran it through her weekly critique group a few chapters at a time (I love how she gives us grades sometimes, and my revised ending got an A+++++, which had me smiling all week). But I've learned that some things that seem to work when reading a few chapters, aren't always strong enough when you read through the full manuscript. Thanks to the help of several amazing beta readers, and going through the full a zillion and one times, I'm pretty sure it will be 1000% ready to submit soon.
Here are some areas I tackled on my last few rounds:
1. I went on a serious streamlining mission. If anything wasn't absolutely necessary to my manuscript, I banished it to my orphan file (which is mind-blowingly huge now). I cut over 6,700 words in a week! And guess what? I don't miss any of them! I think my pacing is much better now, plus I found two areas where I mentioned something that wasn't necessary at that moment, and they ruined surprises later in the manuscript. So...Mom Wars went from about 41,500 to 34,800 words. I wonder what will happen when I get the overall and line suggestions back from Joyce!
2. I found a new way to look for overused words. I tried to keep an eye out for my biggest offenders, like: just, suddenly, so, and crazy amounts of ellipses the past few weeks, and noticed that heart came up quite a few times. Jen's stomach also flip-flopped a lot. I created a page full of charts, one for each overused word I wanted to track, and wrote down the page numbers for all of them. I also kept track of letters to her best friend (which I later decided to cut completely) and blog entries the main character makes.
3. I made sure I tied up all the threads by the end, and that all character arcs were complete (there's a trick for this, too--you can create a file for every conversation with or about each character and read them straight through to make sure the arcs all work).
What do you look for during the last few rounds of revision on your manuscripts?
Here are some areas I tackled on my last few rounds:
1. I went on a serious streamlining mission. If anything wasn't absolutely necessary to my manuscript, I banished it to my orphan file (which is mind-blowingly huge now). I cut over 6,700 words in a week! And guess what? I don't miss any of them! I think my pacing is much better now, plus I found two areas where I mentioned something that wasn't necessary at that moment, and they ruined surprises later in the manuscript. So...Mom Wars went from about 41,500 to 34,800 words. I wonder what will happen when I get the overall and line suggestions back from Joyce!
2. I found a new way to look for overused words. I tried to keep an eye out for my biggest offenders, like: just, suddenly, so, and crazy amounts of ellipses the past few weeks, and noticed that heart came up quite a few times. Jen's stomach also flip-flopped a lot. I created a page full of charts, one for each overused word I wanted to track, and wrote down the page numbers for all of them. I also kept track of letters to her best friend (which I later decided to cut completely) and blog entries the main character makes.
3. I made sure I tied up all the threads by the end, and that all character arcs were complete (there's a trick for this, too--you can create a file for every conversation with or about each character and read them straight through to make sure the arcs all work).
What do you look for during the last few rounds of revision on your manuscripts?