Greetings. It's been some time since I've updated my blog and that's because I've been diligently working through rewrites and edits to my manuscript. At the end of March, I sent my work to Robin Connelly with Saved by the Quill to perform a developmental edit.
For those not familiar with this type of edit, she read the whole manuscript (106,000 words at the time) and provided detailed feedback and analysis of areas I could change and update to strengthen the story and the characters. Her analysis was fantastic, and her pricing was very reasonable. I can't recommend her highly enough. Here is her link if you need editing of all kinds: Saved By The Quill (wordpress.com)
She provided me with her feedback in May and I've just now finished making all the updates. She gave me a multitude of suggestions and I incorporated at least 80% of her feedback, so it was a lot of work.I took it in a two-step process. First, I did the rewrites based on her feedback and saved that as a new version. The edits ballooned the word count to almost 109,000.
With the next (current version) 8, I edited the whole thing and got it down to 103,000 words. The story and characters are much stronger, and I feel good about the work. Looking for a couple Beta+ readers to look it over. I say Beta+ because having gone through such a great developmental edit, I'm not expecting readers to find much to critique about the story itself, although of course I could be mistaken.
At this stage the feedback I'm really looking for is whether or not they enjoyed the story. If they had a good time reading it, that's good enough for me. Of course, I also hope they can point out any inaccuracies.
I have a proofreader lined up for after I get feedback from the beta readers so things are moving right along.
