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Round Two of revi­sions was the same as Round 1, but dif­fer­ent. Same, in that the edi­to­r­ial notes included line-edits and mar­gin­a­lia, as well as a short edi­to­r­ial let­ter (address­ing two major issues that I’ll describe below). Dif­fer­ent in that AEV’s notes came at two dif­fer­ent times—the first half of the novel one week, the sec­ond half, the next. The notes were only AEV’s this time.

Pass 1: With each half of the man­u­script, I culled through the pages. The first step was sep­a­rat­ing the pages into stacks of“marked and unmarked. The unmarked pages were stacked for shred­ding. The marked pages were tagged as I read through them. Line-edits were high­lighted with yel­low. Com­ments in the mar­gins were circled.

Pass 2: I fixed the line-edits. These were straight­for­ward but exten­sive. 75% of the pages had at least one change. Most had 5–10. It took about 20 hours to work through them all. I checked off each edit as I entered it into the computer.

Pass 3: I responded to mar­gin notes. Some of them were easy fixes, such as com­ments about voice con­sis­tency or miss­ing beats. Oth­ers required the recast­ing of sen­tences and some­times, para­graphs. And then there were those soft pas­sages labeled with “Could Be Bet­ter” and “You Haven’t Writ­ten This Yet.” AEV learned quickly that those phrases had a chill­ing effect on me. They also moti­vated me because I real­ized she was right, and I like to make my edi­tor happy.

Pass 4: Back to the edi­to­r­ial let­ter. The two big issues with this ver­sion were two scenes that I had cre­ated or expanded sig­nif­i­cantly dur­ing the first revi­sion. Issue #1 was about a new scene cre­ated to show Pesto, one of the main character’s work­place. AEV liked the sec­ond part of the scene, but she thought the first part widened the scope of the novel too much. So chop! Went about 2k words (words that I really liked, as well). After excis­ing that sequence, I knit­ted the sequence back together and added a few more strokes to define the char­ac­ters. I cre­ated two new minor char­ac­ters for the scene and like them so much I used them twice in the rest of the novel, so I was glad that AEV liked the part that fea­tured them.

Issue #2 con­cerned the Con­ve­nience Store Scene. In the first draft, this scene was meant to be a tran­si­tional bit so that the reader could rest up before the end of the sec­ond act. AEV rec­og­nized that it could do a lot more than that, so in the first set of notes she had asked me to expand it. In the sec­ond edi­to­r­ial let­ter, she asked me to delve into it even more. The right ele­ments were there, but the scene wasn’t cohe­sive, and it wasn’t liv­ing up to its poten­tial. So back into the Quik Stop we went. I spent six hours and twenty min­utes com­pletely rewrit­ing it. Because it was an action scene, the block­ing had to make sense. I spent quite awhile draw­ing the sequence as a comic book and even built a scale model so that I had a firm idea of spa­tial details. I added another minor char­ac­ter as a sound­ing board for Bug (the main char­ac­ter). When the rewrite was fin­ished, I gave the scene to my DW (the most crit­i­cal reader I know). Her first words were “I see why AEV didn’t like this. When are going to start rewrit­ing it?” Grrr. So, it was back into the text. A few hours later, I had some­thing DW thought was passable.

Pass #5: The sec­ond half of the man­u­script arrived. I fol­lowed the same method as above. There was no edi­to­r­ial let­ter, but AEV wanted me to add more sen­sory details to the last two chap­ters, as well as add ten­sion between the two main char­ac­ters. I did this by expand­ing two chap­ters to four while chang­ing much of the mythol­ogy in the scenes. Instinc­tively, I was uneasy with some of the changes I’d made, but I decided to see AEV’s reac­tion before I edited them out.

The revi­sion ended after I lis­tened to the whole man­u­script read by Microsoft Sam. I was able to find many typos and catch sev­eral naps because Sam’s dron­ing voice puts me straight to sleep. Note: There were fewer passes this time because the notes only came from one edi­tor and because they were lim­ited in scale. I also learned to stream­line the process.

Like Round #1, while I was revis­ing for Round 2, I ignored just about every­thing except the man­u­script. Unfor­tu­nately, as soon as the revi­sion was sub­mit­ted, Round 3 started, and it was the most dif­fi­cult round of all.