With all the tender, hanky-waving emotion of Dr Frankenstein bludgeoning his creation to death while screaming 'die, monster, die!' I finally forced myself to email off the revised, edited draft of Angel Stations to my editor this evening. I was trying to explain to someone the other night why I was still holding back, and the best way I could explain it was by referring to the old tale of the thief who breaks into a house and, convinced he hasn't erased all his fingerprints, is still shining every surface in the house when the police turn up the next morning to arrest him. I keep going over the manuscript, thinking '... there must be something I've missed in here ... something!'
The novel was planned out to a certain degree, but with this particular work I let myself drift from the original notes somewhat and, possibly because I was too busy sitting straggly-haired in an armchair with a laptop, rocking backwards and forwards while making vaguely psychotic whining noises, I neglected to thoroughly update the outline to match the changed text. As a result, an early scan of the text revealed one or two huge clunkers which ended up being entirely deleted. To whit: two scenes perhaps forty pages apart in which exactly the same thing happens. One of them was in no way in the service of the story, so out it went. Flensed.
Other minor errors also occurred to me on yet further scans, and these were also corrected, nonetheless leading to the paranoid fear that somewhere in there, I'd missed something. However, it's off to the publishers now. Whether further revisions may yet occur remains to be seen: but for the moment, goodbye, fare thee well and good riddance ...
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