Editing

I'm still editing. I'll be editing for a while, probably at least another month or so. We'll just forget about the fact that I still have two of the chapters towards the end to write. Yeah, we're going to ignore that for a while. They are two of the more complicated chapters because they deal with finally bringing down the bad guys and I need to figure out how to do that and have it be believable but more complicated than just having the good guys show up with guns drawn and say "Freeze".

But anyway, back to editing. It's harder than writing. Why? Because I know the story so well at this point. I could practically spit whole passages back at you from memory. So when I'm editing, I'm trying to figure out what the reader needs to know and what they don't need to know. Since I know everything (only with respect to this story), it's not easy for me to know what I can cut and still have the story make sense.

For example, do we really need to know how the consulting firm got started? Some of that's important, because it goes towards the history between our heroine and the people she's trying to protect. But can I show that history in another way? I'm generally not a huge fan of flashbacks. I think they can get complicated and confusing for the reader. Without flashbacks, however, the heroine has to "tell" someone everything. That's no fun either.

Hmmm. Ok, enough rambling. Time to just get over it and get back to editing.