#Pitchwars Draft (Finally) Submitted

[davidgillon]

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!

Comments

[green_knight]

Too late for this round, but if you set the language to English (US) you should be getting the appropriate squiggles.

And well done for finishing - best of luck with the next step. Sounds as if this is really moving your novel forward!

[rmc28]

This sounds incredibly positive and I look forward to see how the agent round goes ...

[davidgillon]

The irony of all this effort is the agent round comes down to the first 250 words only - the agents they've got lined up look at your (one page) query letter and the first 250 words only. They can ask for more, but you need to sell it to them in those first 250. Luckily everyone agrees I have a killer first line.

The hopeful result is one or more agents being convinced by what they see to ask to see more.

[kaberett]

congrats!

[jesse_the_k]

Many happy returns, (I hope), and one can't write a great first paragraph until the book is finished, right?

[davidgillon]

Yeah. This is really tightening my prose up. It's been interesting to compare my mentors' focus on my prose with other people who have been having major changes in structure thrown at them by their mentors. There's at least one person rewriting their entire novel from 1st to 3rd person or vice versa, and there's no way I could have done that in the time available (though the YA books are about half the length of mine).

[davidgillon]

Well, in this case the entire book was built around the first line, which has remained constant since I first started playing with this in the very early Oughties (though the bulk of the work was done last year).

(Suspect there's a metaphor in there that's whizzing over my head, like I said, sleeeepp!)