Thursday 3 March 2011

BACK IN THE LAND OF THE LIVING

The last few weeks have been difficult. Nell is away in Russia and I got the first edit of The Demi-Monde:Spring back, so it's been very hectic.

It's amazing how you change over the course of a year. When I submitted Spring twelve months ago I thought it was pretty good but when I got it back it just seemed bloated. So ... I decided it needed slimming from 191,000 words to as near as I could get to 150,000. It's a difficult task knocking out so many words because if you're not careful you can destroy the plot. It took me 120 hours of solid, concentrated work to achieve it. I'm finally down to 156,000 and the book is all the better for it. Now all that remains is a final read-through and then it's off to Quercus.

One thing's for sure I'll never ever over-write again!

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