The First Draft of Cherubim is finally finished. It took me a bit longer than I expected, but then again it is about thirty or so thousand words longer than Nightwalker was when it was finished. And now its time to start thinking about revisions and editing. Which is going to take quite a while I'm thinking. Not as long as the original draft, but a fair amount of time is going to be needed.
The ending changed significantly from what I had in mind originally. So, that's going to mean having to go back and re-thread certain elements into a whole lot of the earlier parts of the story just to make everything fit nicely together. The most significant part is going to be having to revise how one of the character is portrayed. The new ending changed the character just enough to require going back over the parts she is in and tweaking how she's represented.
I think it's going to make for a better character, and may end up changing two other characters as well. There's already some ground work for at least one of them all laid out already, so that won't take as much work. But enough that it's going to present some challenges.
And it all starts with the prologue. the prologue, which I've heard some people don't like for some reason or another, is where the character at the end is kind of introduced. It sets the theme up so to speak, so i have to be careful with the revisions so that I don't' disrupt how I want the whole thing to feel.
Thankfully, the prologue spills kinda roundabout into the first chapter. So I can make the fixes to the character early on. It makes the list of changes I need to make a little easier to manage.
That's one of the things I've noticed about how I write. The further along in the story I get, the more things need to be altered slightly here and there to previous chapters to fit in with the idea I'm going for. It means the story is almost constantly evolving, and until the very end, I'm never really sure how the whole thing is going to completely turn out. Oh I have a general idea, but its the little details that tend to change more often than not.
A conversation in a later chapter will often cause me to go back to re-evaluated or change/expand on something in the earlier chapters. Which can lead to going back to where i was originally and altering that a little bit here and there etc, etc. Problem I run into from time to time is getting into a never ending loop. So I have to force myself to back off or I'll be editing and revising forever and the book will never get done.
Got to avoid that just one more syndrome.
Tonight was a productive night in the editing and revising. Going through the prologue and the first chapter, I caught a few mistakes I'd missed previously, and managed to hit on the character interactions I needed to tinker with at the same time. So far so good.
Got a lot more to go. Thirty Two chapters in fact. It's going to take me a while I'm guessing. But I have the weekend coming up so I should be able to get a nice chunk finished over the weekend. Maybe.
We'll see.
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