About Those Edits . . .

Caerphilly Castle
Caerphilly, Wales (UK)
(c) 1997 - Jana Oliver

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The edit of my DragonFire series continues. This is a quick post as to what's new and how close we are to the first book's publication.

The final edit of The Circle of the Swan (DragonFire Book 1) is complete. It's currently being eyeballed by yet another beta reader who will let me know if anything doesn't track. Because there's always something.

Why did this book need a complete rewrite? I'll be honest -- I was a newbie back in 2001 when this was originally published. I knew how to spin a tale, but often the execution of that tale wasn't as polished it needed.

So polishing I have been. Since then I've learned to not "head hop" in a scene. That means I'm no longer switching points of view from one character to another and confusing the reader. The first edit was simply deciding who needed the POV in a scene and then rewriting all the text to make that happen. Usually it's whichever characters as the most to gain or lose in that scene. I also had a habit of repeating something a couple times just in case the reader didn't get it. No, really. No surprise, the book's total word count dropped dramatically (20%). 

Edit #2 got into verifying that the plot moved forward like to should and Edits #3 & #4 dealt with timeline issues and getting deeper into the characters' heads. The final edit tied all this together. Things that were glossed over in the original version have been clarified, the characters strengthened, and the timeline is correct. Which meant I had to go back thirty years in the storyline to figure out who did what when. <not fun>

These are all things I've learned after a quarter century as a writer. Once the beta reader is done and any inconsistencies are corrected, COS goes to my proofreader, followed by the typesetter, and then publication. Estimated launch date is sometime this summer. 

The second book's edit went faster (slightly shorter book), but I found some major timeline issues. <sighs> Clearly The Healer's Path is gonna need some heavy duty fiddling. Somehow I'm not surprised. And yet, it's doable.

Future blog posts will talk about how I did some local research (Portugal has sooo many castles) and how I changed around some of the boring medieval terminology and freshened up the storyline. But right now I'm really, really happy with how Circle of the Swan turned out. 

Onward!


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