A couple months ago, I made a double batch of orange cinnamon rolls, wrapped up one pan, and threw it in the freezer. I took it out to thaw today because I’ve earned no-effort sugar and gluten.
That’s right, kiddies. This round of revision is done! 🥳 *arthritic twerking*
240 rough draft pages have become 370 revised pages.
The Embiggening Draft lived up to its name, growing from 108,704 words to 173,907, which is about where I predicted it would be. I did add some new scenes, but I also cut several. Much of the growth, honestly, can be accounted for by simply making full sentences out of my primitive grunts.[efn_note]Behold a few “sentences” from a random page of the rough draft: Resolute. Sighed. Did something. No point making them pretty until I’m certain the paragraph, scene, or even act is staying.[/efn_note]
Heroine and Hero completed their quest and can now take a breath and relish no longer being main characters, but they leave us in the final chapter/epilogue with their thoughts about some threads they brushed against that weren’t their job to tie in a neat bow, foreshadowing trouble to come. Which (a) acknowledges that if the reader thought something was A Thing, the author didn’t forget to address it, it just wasn’t part of this story and (b) hints at the overarching plot that will be tackled in subsequent books on the backs of those characters’ personal quests.[efn_note]There’s exactly one main character interested in the overarching plot. Everyone else has a selfish, book-length agenda that just happens to be a cog in the overarching plot machine.[/efn_note]
I don’t get the book shakes at the end of a revision. The first draft being scooped out of my brain leaves a hole that causes physical side effects, but revision crams the book back in, bigger, so there’s none of that sickening hollowness. I have a vague sense that creation for me is really destruction (of what I’m not sure—expectations, ambitions, limitations, confidence, hubris, other, all of the above) and revision is building on the ashes, but unpacking that sounds like a lot of tedious navel gazing for no benefit.
Now I have to formulate a plan of attack and organize my weapons for the next skirmish. The new generation of updates shall ensue anon.