The Revision is Done!

Hey! How are you today?

Well, it's Friday. The 1st of September. The first day of spring. And the coldest day we've had for a while.

I went for a nice and long walk earlier and the wind chilled me to the bone. 🥶

Anyway, enough about the weather.

This turned out to be another busy week for me. The final read-thru usually is. It's when I sit down with my Paperwhite and read the story from start to finish. Doing this always highlights repetition, sentences that are too long, or awkward wording. Things that don't add anything to the overall story. It's when I end up cutting a lot of words and replacing even more.

I don't know why it happens, but every story has a handful of particular words that somehow appear a hundred times. LOL. This time it was: focus, accept and heart. I had to make sure there wasn't too many of them. The great thing about weeding out repetition words is that when I replace them, the new word choice ends up strengthening the sentence. Or encourages me to rewrite it completely.

Like I said, it's the nitty-gritty stage that sharpens the dialogue and narrative. The draft that enforces the emotional depth and develops the character connections even more. With this particular novella, I also had to re-read the sexy scenes a few times because they add a new layer to what's going on. 

I actually finished finalising everything late last night and ended up cutting roughly one thousand words. But a tiny addition that makes a big impact came to me during the day. So I added the few sentences this afternoon, and now it's really done.

The final word count is: 46,580.

I'm very happy with this novella.

It's a story that started as a way for me to deal with the unexpected loss of our beloved Loki. Losing him earlier this year hit us hard, and I didn't deal with it very well. He was my writing buddy, spent all day with me while I created stories. In many ways, he kept me in check. Without him around I tend to take less breaks, and sometimes even forget to eat. I miss him a lot and writing this novella helped me deal with how much his absence has affected me.

From the loss came a spark. An idea that stemmed from my own thoughts. And from that, I now have a completed manuscript about grief, love, and accepting what was there all along. That it turned into so much more and took my characters to places and situations I didn't expect, is a plus. 

It's been an emotional ride, but I'm glad I followed through and let my imagination run wild.

August turned out to be pretty busy. I finished writing a 30k novella, edited another one that will be published later this month (15k), and revised this one (46k). Yikes.

Well, that's pretty much all I wanted to say today. Just an update to mention that this novella is DONE. Yay!! 😊🎉

I'm going to enjoy the weekend with my husband and then take a week off writing. After that, think I'll get stuck into another lot of revision for this novella.

Take it easy and have a good one!