David*Macinnis*Gill.com

The last of the man­u­script arrived at 6:06 PM, a day and half later than expected.This both­ered my won­der­ful pub­lisher friends more than it did me because they have dead­lines to meet, mar­ket­ing to do, etc. Me, all I have to do is accept some spot-on line edits and do a lit­tle seed­ing here and there.Plus, here’s a dark secret I’ve never shared: As I did the third revi­sion, I kept think­ing, “I’m never send­ing the man­u­script back! Bwa­haha! Well, maybe for copy­edit­ing, but not after that.”

I enjoyed work­ing on the man­u­script too much, and if I gave it up, I’d be expected to start a new book. And we all known that I am a fraud who some­how con­vinced a group of very smart, able peo­ple that I can write a novel.

At 6:20 PM, after let­ting the man­u­script fer­ment for all of 14 min­utes, I opened the enve­lope then started sorting.Edited pages to the left, unmarked pages to the dis­card pile. Over 80% of the pages required some sort of edit.I’ll pause here to add that only once in the process of revi­sions did I stet one of AEV’s sug­ges­tions. It was a one-liner that was mildly humor­ous by itself, but I had ref­er­encedit at least twice more in the novel and used it to set up a reveal later (a free Tup­per­ware bowl to the first astute reader who can guess the stet’ed line).

Gen­er­ally, I used he same process before—cull, reword, and then rewrite. The last three chap­ters required some cut­ting, which is eas­ier than writ­ing new pieces. I was sat­is­fied that the last chap­ter had the new touches AEV asked for (bet­ter open­ing line, more humor, less sap), I let Microsoft Sam read key sequences and the final chap­ters to me.I found at least six typos in the last chap­ter, even after proof­ing it three times. Best of all, I didn’t fall asleep once, and I made my dead­line to the minute.

I said in the last post that this was the most dif­fi­cult revi­sion. So what made it so hard? Not the actual line edits, because although they were numer­ous, they were minor. Not the cut­ting because it made the story tighter and saved me time hav­ing to recast a few clunky pas­sages. No, it was the final­ity of it. I knew that when the man­u­script went to copy­edit­ing, it would no longer be the story that AEV and I had made. It would become a book that was shared with oth­ers, and despite the fact that I’ll have to respond to copy­ed­its, my writ­ing would be done: the story that revi­sion 3 cre­ated would be the novel Soul Enchilada.