MathiasCavanaugh.com

So, I have, I admit, been spending too much time on Twitter as of late and not doing enough editing on my novel, Under the Darkened Moon. I have been editing, just not as much as I should be. I’m nearly 75% complete with my polishing edit and, of course, after a year is when I now decide to make the main character 23 years old for the bulk of the story rather than 28. That of course means some timeline editing, etc. but nothing major.

I weighed the pros and cons and decided to make the change I have been batting around in my brain for the better part of the last six months. I give up some of the maturity aspect that the character would have had, but that is about it. Plus it makes some of my possible sequels work better by shifting the entire story ahead five years. This allows me to keep certain characters alive more plausibly than having passed to the ravages of time or being 70 years old at best.

I actually started the polish edit with Chapter 36. Don’t ask why. I just did. It was an whim. Then I looped back around and headed for Chapter 1. Right now I have gone back up through Chapter 21 and am in the meat of Chapter 22.

Once this polish is done, it is on to a live read edit where I can hear the ways things sound with other people reading them.

Not a whole lot is changing in the polishing process. I’m fixing some commas and fiddling with compound versus stand alone sentences for the most part. Although there have been some points where I have added words and changed a few things. The really major thing I have been doing is tweaking paragraph structures. It’s one of those gray area things we authors have to deal with and determine where one thought ends and another begins. There is a lot of leeway and I have opted to work with as short of paragraphs as possible at the suggestion of some of my reviewers.

So, I’m maybe another two months from being complete on this project. We will see.