Finished Editing!

Or I should say finished at least for now. I have finally completed the last chapter edits of my civil war novel, The Long Defeat. Thanks to my professional editor I have not only the satisfaction of a job well done, but also the confidence that my manuscript is as polished and sharp as can possibly be. I have now begun resubmitting my novel, as requested, to several different literary agents in the hope that my novel in its newly revised form will spark their continued interest.

Now, the reason I mention before that the editing process is done for the time being, refers to the fact that usually every stage of the progression of publishing a novel requires further edits. An agent may request specific edits, your publishing house, and even sometimes the bookseller. All in all, writing is certainly rewriting in the publishing business. But I am nonetheless ecstatic to have my novel cleaned up and ready for the next step.

One of the things I mentioned in a previous post regarding editing is that it seems like story length gets shortened as the editing process goes on. This has resulted in my novel being around 60,000 words now, a good, but shorter length novel for historical fiction, which many agents prefer be 70,000 or 80,000 or even 90,000 words or more. Needless to say, this business standard conflicts directly with everything I ever learned in Creative Writing classes, namely that if you can shorten or tighten a story up it will make it better. I have no qualms about lengthening my story, but I don’t want to fill it with needless fluff in order to reach a preordained word count that is supposed to make a book more marketable on a graph. But I am open, and optimistic as always, and ready to cross whatever bridges may be required in order to continue to bring my novel to light.