Now I need to edit...

I need to begin editing my novel, and yet  I keep procrastinating on it.  It has been complete for over 3 weeks now, and while dh has begun his edit of it, I have yet to implement them.   He has read over half of the book now, and has made several edits for grammar errors, and some commentary for some other areas as well.  The grammar errors would be the easiest to fix, and then I can go through and look at his comments, but sooner or later I am going to have to read it myself and I will need to make some major changes.   It is this part I am not looking forward to.

        The major grammatical errors that I have noticed so far are tense endings and punctuation.  I found myself changing tenses quite often, and just decided that I would wait until edit to fix them.  It seems I could never decide from writing session to writing session if I was past tense or present tense :).  As for punctuation, most of those errors came about because I was just writing so darn fast.  In some writing sessions I was getting as many as 2000 words done in an hour and a half.  As a result, lots and lots of errors.   I completely accepted the Nano challenge of blocking the inner editor and just writing with complete abandonment.  I know that if I had not done that, I would never have written a book at all.  So, I am so glad I did, and yet, now I have to deal with it lol.

I already know there is one glaring issue that needs to be addressed.  It involves a supporting character, and basically the fact that I did very little to him.  I did enough in the first quarter of the book I have to decide whether I will either dump him all together, or I will have to really develop his character more and have him make more involved in the story.  

The easy way of course would be to cut him, really he needs little more then a mention, there is no need to build his character, and in the beginning I was purely thinking of word count when I brought him up.  Now that I am not forced to the 50K word count, if I cut him, I won't be hurting the prospects of winning the Nano, however, if I do cut him, I will be cutting at least 3000 words, and I don't want to cut willy nilly and end up with a novella as opposed to a novel.

I just did a quick search on average novel length, and it seems about 40K to 80K is normal.    Of course, content is more important the pure numbers, and for a first novel for a first time writer, even a tad under 50K would be fine (imo :)   I am sure that as I go about editing, I won't just be taking parts out, I will be adding content, so it is likely to average out in the end.

Another reason I am afraid to read it, is because I am afraid it is no good.  Dh has been reading it and he says it is good, he seems to like it so far.  I, however, lack confidence in this type of thing, and worry if it's just a piece of junk.     This really is my biggest hold up in terms of reading and editing it.  I know that a first draft is very raw, and a first draft that was written in 16 days, will be extremely raw, I see big edits ahead of me, to get it to something worth letting others read.

I have had several people interested in reading it, which surprises me, again that whole lack of confidence thing, so I really do want to get the editing done for that reason.

As a Nanowrimo winner, I have the option of having a few free bound copies if I want to do that.  I think that is such an awesome opportunity and I really do not want to pass it up.  For that reason, I have to have everything ready to submission by the end of Spring.  While I am a major procrastinator, I will need to stay focused and use that motivation to keep me moving forward.    I am excited by this prospect and really do not want to miss it due to procrastination on my part.

In another week, things will calm way down here at home, school will be over for the year and I'll have six weeks off, so that will probably be a very good time to focus on this.    As the Christmas holidays are generally not very busy for us, I can sit with the boys and read and edit a paper copy, while they are playing.  At least it'll keep me off the computer for a while :)