To my mortal embarrassment, I declared in April that Farisa’s Courage was “revision complete”. Hahaha. I suppose that one can take liberties regarding what is revision and what is editing, but… let’s just say that I underestimated the amount of work remaining.
I sent the manuscript out to some beta readers, people whose opinions I trust. I got a sense of where my work stands relative to the field, what elements I should amplify and which I should remove, and what mistakes I made in the original draft. I’ve read quite a few books on editing, from the level of individual words and punctuation marks, up to book-level content editing.
The book, as it stands right now, is good. It’s better than 97% of the titles garnering the coveted six-figure advances and gate-crashing the best-seller lists. The characters are strong; the world is intriguing; the ideas are important. It will leave my readers curious about where I intend to go in the second, third, and Nth books. Still… it’s not the best book that it can be, yet. So, my job isn’t done.
I had hoped to be ready for my second round of beta-reading by this time; it looks more likely that this will take place in September or October.
