I’m halfway through the final edit of the book. The second quarter took me way longer to do than I ever intended.

A large part of that was procrastination, which I have come to realize is my mortal sin. There’s no good reason for it and it bugs me how easily I can put something off. The strange thing is how great it feels to accomplish a major milestone. You’d think that would always be the main driving factor but my mind doesn’t seem to regard that reward as strong enough. It’s something to work on.

But I digress. The edits I did took way more work to do than I initially thought. Making changes to how Tim gets his plan out turned out to be more complicated. I read the whole section and made notes on where what I needed to change was. I first organized my thoughts and ideas that way. Then I started moving things around. Deleting sections or maybe just some dialog. Move entire sections forward or back.

The first big thing: moving sections makes gaps. So continuity gets broken and the parts don’t fit together. That meant I needed to write new transitions. So that was easy or hard depending on what it is. And whenever I write something new, sometimes I like it a lot, sometimes I know I need to come back to it and sometimes I think it’s good but then I read it and I hate it.

Rewriting those parts happened a lot. Which meant a ton of tweaks which meant I thought and rethought everything. I did a lot of pacing around in my head. For a while there it felt like I was focused solely on punching things up and changing conversations to ensure it makes sense.

So I’m on to the next chunk. I have some serious tweaks to do in this section for the city scene. I have a good idea of what I’m going to and in this part, I don’t think I’m going to have to move anything, it’ll be more like tailoring a suit. Change details to get my intention across better (very important…it’s a sensitive scenario) and do some better world building to bolster that.

Right now I’m thinking it’ll be pretty easy but that’s exactly what I thought when I was going into the section I just finished. So, well see. But it will be done and it will be better.