One By One

Okay, I'm knocking edits off the list I made...one by one. After talking to Bob on the phone, I had made a list of about six different minor issues that needed to be addressed in From the Ninth Wave. At this point, I've finished trolling for adjectives and eliminated all of the extraneous ones. The ones I kept needed to stay because they clarified some description or otherwise made a difference to the readers' understanding of something. The ones I eliminated were in places where I had two or three when I really only needed one, or the noun was strong enough to stand alone and ditching the adjective didn't paint too austere a picture.

Then there were the content edits. My character had the habit of making occasional movie references. I had to eliminate any of those that undercut an otherwise tense scene. It's really too bad; thinking in terms of movie quotes was my heroine's way of lightening the mood when things got too tense for her, and it showed who she was as a character. But if she did it in a place where it also diffused the tension for the reader, it had to go. Even my favorite one--a quote by Milady DeWinter from Disney's The Three Musketeers. Dang it. I know, I know. Kill your darlings. Well, I only kept two in the entire book; neither was a direct quote, and neither diffused the tension because they didn't come in the middle of a crisis. Tricky little bit of work, that was.

As for the rest, I still need to go through and find a few places where I can spice certain things up here and there, and I need to find all the places where I somehow managed to make my point twice. That's going to be trickier for me to find, but I'll do it. I should be nearly done with this round. I'm hoping it's the last until a publisher gets her/his hands on it.