The third edit pass was today’s job, starting with the terrible stuff in chapter 11 from last night. It wasn’t actually that terrible, although I have shifted some stuff around and, to my continued surprise, taken a lot of things out. I’ve overwritten in several places that I’ve spotted and I suspect several I haven’t yet and it’s really pleasing to see how the text flows better when the extraneous guff is taken out.
The thing is, I’ve gone as far as I can with edits on the main text, which means tomorrow I move onto the appendices. At the moment there are two; one is the answers to the Halloween Parade and the other is a list of all the end quotes for the year. After three full days of word by word, paragraph warfare, that’s actually going to be rather fun.
As for the main text? That’s off to my beta readers. At some point in the next 24 hours, a group of friends will get an email with the text attached to it and the point at which I need the text back, as a list of the places and things I’d like them to pay special attention to. Once they’ve got the text back to me and I’ve acted on their edits, it’s officially done and I’ll be talking about what that means for the project shortly.