Meredith Mansfield, Author

Revisions on BEYOND THE PROPHECY are moving along at a comfortable pace–now.

I was worried about staying on schedule last week. That was because I had to add basically a whole new scene. And it was slow going.

Adding a scene at this stage is like going back to the first draft. But, doing it while my editor brain is still engaged–which means I question every sentence. A normal first draft can be allowed to be bad. I can skip things like descriptions or dialog tags, because I’m going to go through several more drafts to fix those things. That’s no longer true at this stage. There’ll hopefully be only one more pass–the polishing edit. So this scene had to be close to final-draft perfect on the first pass. It was a lot of pressure and slow going.

I got it done, though. I may tweak it a bit before the polishing edit, but it’s basically there. And I think it strengthens the story. The action is more true to the character.

Most of the revisions from this point will be less dramatic. Right now, I’m averaging slightly over two chapters a day, which will comfortably finish this draft by the end of the month. On target again.