Fourth draft put to bed

Last month I told you I'd completed the third draft of my novel. Today, I'm even happier to report the fourth draft is put to bed, only a little over a month later.

There's a few reasons for my greatly enhanced speed of working. Firstly, I've resigned from the large and significant project I've been working on for the last two years. Its first release went live successfully and on time last month, and this milestone presented me with the opportunity to leave gracefully, having led the project technically through its proof of concept, procurement, development and initial delivery phases. This gives me vastly more spare time, which this month I've devoted almost entirely to writing.

Secondly, I designed a small macro to highlight "danger" words. Running this against my work made it much easier to spot overwriting, run-on sentences, passive voice and a host of other no-nos, so I was able to rattle through and correct all these things much more quickly.

And finally, there's nothing better for focussing the mind than the possibility that your work may actually see the light of day. I can't say very much about this at the moment, but let's just say I'm much more hopeful of finding a publisher now than I was a couple of months ago.

So is it done? Well, not quite. Editing my way through the whole thing this time round, it was clear that the second half is much better than the first. You expect the pace to build up later, I know, once the characters and the plot have been established, but even so I feel I can do a better job with the first half, so I'm giving myself one more go-through to make the thing as good as it can be.

I'll need to concentrate more on the job at hand though. All too often I reach the end of a chapter and realise I've just been reading it rather than editing it. Tsk. Concentrate!