But at night I'm a red pen junkie, God Lord have pity on me

Went through the hard copy last night for round three of edits to the first four (maybe thinking five) chapters. There wasn't as much as I thought there might be which leads me to four conclusions.

• I'm getting much better and/or novels are my natural length


• The first round of edits were more thorough than I realized


• I was really to tired (up again till midnight) and close to the material to be completely honest with myself


• I'm fooling myself and under the deadline gun while being lazy so I intentionally am shirking my self-editing responsibilities

I really want to say it's somewhere between the first two of those, but I have a feeling it's between the second and third bullets.

So let me be clear. There's enough red ink on all the pages (no, there are no pages without marks) that those who have an aversion to the red pen would be dry heaving by now, but it's not as much as I normally have on the second draft edits (more like four or fifth draft). I've marked something that need changed, but nothing big. The big things are mostly sentence and some paragraph re-construction. There is not a note saying, "must add paragraph here" or a big red X through a whole paragraph. Actually most of the paragraph stuff consisted of, "This belongs with this paragraph" or "this is a new paragraph, not part of the last."

About the biggest change is thinking I need to divide the fourth chapter in two. Same arguments as dividing the first chapter in two, so I think I'm good with doing it. There's a lot going on. It might be good to break it up between large group and small group interactions. Plus I'm thinking of pulling some of what was chapter five into the end of what was chapter four. That I need to think more about.

Tonight I'll go over it again, make the changes and then go over it again. The plan is to have it in the mail on Friday or Saturday at the latest.

In other novel news a part of what is probably late Act II or maybe early Act II started coming out. I completely didn't expect this. Looking through the stuff it does plug some plot holes and makes sense with moving up the one reveal to the end of Act I instead of being at the end of Act II. I'm also happy that the story is 1) coming out of order again (most of my stories do this) and 2) I'm still being surprised by the story.