Last night, about 9:45 PM Central Time, I put the closing words on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Well, that’s not quite true. A few minutes later I thought of something I meant to say in the last scene, so I added that in, just one more sentence. The word count is 87,079. That’s 2,000 more than I was shooting for, based on my understanding of what the market will accept for a book like this.

So what’s next? I am tied up with my day job exceedingly between now and Friday evening, so will ignore FTSP. This weekend I hope to do some more wood sawing and splitting, keeping on working and building my muscles, and hopefully driving away the lingering effects of the ehrlichiosis. I have other writing to do: some articles for two different web sites, some non-fiction book stuff, as well as research for those. So I plan to let FTSP sit on the computer (properly backed-up, of course) for a week, maybe two.

When I get back to it, I’ll finish printing it, then read through the whole thing on paper. I’ll be looking for typos, as well as plot inconsistencies and places where the action isn’t adequately described. Also I’ll be looking for problems such as excessive telling rather than showing, head hopping, info dumps, etc. Although, I’m pretty sure I don’t have any info dumps, and that I used a nice mix of showing and telling. Head hopping I don’t really care about, but I’ll be watching for it. I suspect this will take two weeks.

Then, after the plot consistency review, I’ll do my own line and content edit. This will be looking for better ways to say what I wrote, in fewer words, with stronger verbs and fewer adjectives and adverbs. This should take three weeks or even a month. After that will be another proof reading. I will likely include what I call a “software edit”; that is, using MS Word features to search for typically overused words, such as that, there (not referring to place), -ly words, -ing words, forms of “to be”, etc. I’ve somewhat trained myself not to use too many of these as I write the first draft, but they creep in unawares, and must be rooted out.

So that all adds up to two or three months of editing, maybe less if I can find concentrated time to do it, and don’t distract myself too much with other works. Surely by that time I’ll have heard back from the agent, be it pass, accept, or more info. At that point I’ll have to give serious thought of how I want to publish it—especially if the agent passes. Self-publishing will be an option on the table.