Paksworld

This afternoon,  my editor’s comments came in, and at first glance look reasonable, doable, and slightly embarrassing (why didn’t  I think of that and do it that way first??   Because I was head deep in the characters and thinking their way, not writer-way.)

If I’d been able to climb out–which would’ve meant writing the whole entire story first–I might have seen this but possible not.   The temptation of a sequel group 20+ years after the original group is to carefully outline all the connections for readers so they don’t get “lost” and that can (and apparently does) stick out as great big *slow down and listen* checkpoints.

This can be fixed, and will be fixed, and thank heavens for a good, sympathetic, and clear-eyed editor who understands how and why it happened but also that it can’t be left there.  Until I’m done with at least the first round of this, it supercedes work on number 2, which is far enough along that it won’t lose too much momentum while I’m cleaning up number 1.    (And yes, this is why I’ve been pushing on as hard as I have, despite having months till deadline.  I knew a major cleanup was coming and wanted this one past any “stuck” places–or at least most of them–before leaving it for a bit.)

Readers often worry that they’re missing something they’d like, when an editor wants revisions–and the experience of finding something wonderful on the extended DVD of a movie that restores cuts can increase that worry–but in my case I think most–way over 90%–of the editorial changes asked for in my books have improved them.    It’s not that the books totally sucked before–they didn’t–but I’m the kind of writer who plunges in over her head while writing, barely coming up for a gasp of air now and then.

In multi-volume story arcs, in particular, it’s hard to keep track of what readers are likely to remember from one volume to another and then figure out how/when to insert what they need without making them trip over it.   The original Paks books had plenty of time (I hadn’t had any fiction published yet)  and even so my editor improved them by pointing out duplications,  sections where a character was (in fact) musing about something for days, but readers were not going to want to read about that hour by hour, etc.

So what you “lose” as I go through will not be something that, if you saw it on the extended version, would make you say “Oh, I wish that bit was in the book.”  No, you’d be saying “Boy do I understand why *that* isn’t in.  How tedious!”