So, at the end of July, I was able to announce reaching a major milestone. The full POV and structural rewrite I’d started in early 2019 was FINISHED. The omniscient POV is gone and the manuscript is now told almost entirely from the perspectives of my two protagonists: Dyanna and Venerio.
I struggled so much with it and it was a real learning curve to write in third limited. Thankfully, it seems to have worked. Unfortunately, because of the very prominent mental health themes, switching to third limited ballooned my word count. Lots of mental and emotional roller coasters as my characters navigate depression, PTSD, identity and symptoms of psychosis. Who’d have thought that would massively increase my word count?? ^^;
So, now I’m blitzing through a word cut pass and getting some feedback from a round of betas on the newly-rewritten full (so far, so good!). The total came to nearly 180k words, so I’m going through squeezing out whatever I can to get under 150k. After that, I will be querying. I’ve gone through about 35% of the manuscript and shaved 11k words so far, so hopefully I can get another 20k off as I work my way through. I’ve had to cut a chapter I love, but at least I’ll have a lovely, polished deleted scene to offer someday when the time comes!
Over the coming weeks, I get to start putting a query list together…. I don’t know whether to be excited or terrified.
E P Larrson 