I finally finished reading through the entire 130 thousand words of it, marking errors and making revision notes with my pink pen (yes pink). At least the second half is pretty clean, but I need to do some major rewrites in the first half. I originally thought this two-book YA trilogy was going to be one book, but the first draft kept getting longer and longer and longer…until finally I gave in to its desires instead of mine, and split it in half. I am not one of those sensible, sane people who can write an outline and stick to it. My version of an outline is a folder full of napkins and little torn squares of papers with scrawled notes, bits of story, and characters’ names. So while my beloved First Reader was reading “Mask of Destiny”, I was working on the first draft of the second half, book number two: “Mask of Fate”.
Needless to say, my original perception of where the story was going to end up changed somewhere in the middle of book two, a major character changed, and now there are any number of annoying little and not-so-little details I wrote in “Destiny” that now have to be re-written to jive with what happens in “Fate”. It’s a bloody good thing I find revisions fun and relaxing (it’s first drafts that scare me spitless!) So I’m actually looking forward to beginning the process.
Out of Eden 