whew!

After six weeks at 30+ hours per week, I've finally finished the redux on my first book, SENTINEL. Well, finished in the loosest sense of the word. I've got a four page list of "fixes" and "checks" and I still need to print it out and read the hard copy.

SENTINEL is a radically changed book from V1.0 from so many years ago, a better book which tells more of the story I originally wanted to tell. At 110,000 words, it's not necessarily thinner that its predecessors, but it's leaner and meaner. One of my critters recently told me that she had just come to realize how dense my prose is. (The best compliment I've ever recieved on my writing, perfectly timed as that has been my main, unspoken goal in the past year.)

What's been most intriguing during this process is how efficiently I can now make suggested changes--(whether I'm doing it well will be determined by much smarter people than me). Not only did I challenge myself to work quickly, because I'd like to write more than one book a year, but in hand with that, I've tried to develop the skills to execute with quality. I've said for four years that I didn't yet have the skill level to tell this story the way I want to. For the first time, I think I may be approaching it. Not perfectly, but I can find my flaws more clearly now. Definitely the single greatest thing I ever did was set aside the series for a couple of years and work on other projects. I was just too close to it, though I've always expected it is a viable, sellable, imminently enjoyable story.

Now we'll see if the world agrees.