This is, of course, only the first edit, known to myself as Baring the Bones, or The Excavation. This is when you pull the bones of the story out of all the verbiage, and try and find out what each scene is about. At the end of this first dig you have a short fallow phase where you let the sediment settle to the bottom of the pool, and hopefully see the whole skeleton of the book, often accompanied with some aha moments - "So that's what that was all about!"
Then we have the second, and worst, edit. This is when you have to do a preliminary fix of all the scenes that are wrong. Either wrong because they're pointless, or the point is so submerged no-one could see it. Sometimes you work on one scene for four days and end up having to dump it. It's actually better if you can see straight away if you don't need it. The second edit is much slower and more time-consuming.
Once it's done you do the third edit. This is the same as the second edit, fixing those good old intuitive just-doesn't-feel-right scenes. However, this is both easier and harder. Easier because now you can read straight through longish stretches of the book, admiring what a great writer you are and, for the first time, enjoying your own prose. However, every once and a while there are the remaining scenes left over from the second edit that you just couldn't get right. These have to be worked again (and again). And by now they are getting to be like work-hardened metal. Brittle, intractable and forced. But you get them as good as you can and read it yet again, in edit three, by now beginning to detest some of your characters' habits and finding yourself imitating them out loud, with sneering.
This is the crazy phase (like any of it is sane), when you talk back to them and pick holes in their arguments and get aggressive and nit-picking. I suppose you become every hostile, critical reader, and I suppose it's a kind of failsafe to make sure the book holds water. Either that or it's just stir-crazy boredom.
And then it's back to the start for edit four. This is getting ready for the final brush up. You're watching for typos now, unsympathetic punctuation - do you need more? Less? Was your last decision on comma use wrong after all (shit), and they all have to come out again? You put 'em in, you take 'em out. It gets stupid and brain-frying. But you get through, finding some of the cursed scenes now read beautifully. (Paradoxically, some of the best scenes invariably come form the worst original material. Now, you could ponder on why that is for a long time).
However some of them don't. Some of them still aren't right. So you tweak some more, occasionally give up and rip the fucker out, other times rewrite entirely and leave them to see how they brew.
And then it's the fifth and last edit. Primarily proof reading now, but, let's face it, still editing up to the last minute, occasionally, and reluctantly, admitting that one or two of the scenes will have to go 'as is' or you will die with the book unpublished.
Of course, right up till the day it goes to the printer you keep picking and tweaking. I remember sitting the day before production of Volume I literally feeding fifty or sixty 'corrections' into the Quark file original.
It never stops.
So, that's what I have to look forward to. And, of course, I have an additional problem with this Volume. Because 2 and 3 were all one book originally it has an arbitrary break in the 'middle' where Danny goes away. This is the present Volume 2 and is currently 938 pages long (the shortest of all the books). Volume 3, however, is 1519 pages long. Lopsided, as you can see. So I will have to continue reading into 3 to see if any of it could/should be moved into 2.
If, as I suspect, it will not be artistically pleasing to have any of it in Volume 2 it will mean Volume 3 will have to be sold as a two part book. So it will be Danny Volume 3 parts I and 2. Fun, huh?
