#Pitchwars Draft (Finally) Submitted

I finally sent the latest draft off to my mentors at lunchtime today. The original plan had been to send it off Wednesday, but we had a last minute realisation I'd forgotten something - American spellings. I'm British, KT's Aussie even if US resident, we're both unconsciously happy reading the UK spellings, but this time it's off to Jami for a complete line-edit, including checking spellings for submissions to US agents. So I had to load in the Word US dictionaries and spell-check the whole thing. Adding a dictionary, no problem. Deleting a dictionary so it no longer thinks UK spellings are okay, almost impossible. I had to google a solution in the end, and that looks like a kludge rather than working as designed. Add to that a last set of checks for filter words and passive voice and it took a few days extra, but that was worthwhile, Jami and KT could't have gotten to it earlier anyway, and I cut the length by another 800 words in that pass, one word at a time.

But it's gone now, and I can take a rest for a week to 10 days before a final manic incorporation of Jami's line-edit and KT's work on the start and agent submissions prior to the agent round on November 3rd. My first draft was 144kwds, I cut that to 121kwds for the Pitchwars submission, it's now just under 100kwds, which I wouldn't have believed possible a month ago. And pretty much all of that is rewriting rather than deletions. It's now a more marketable length (120k was possible, but pushing it) and a much tighter piece of work. Really pleased with how this has gone.

Gonna go sleep for a week!