Hey all!

I've been dabbling in fanfiction for the last eighteen years or so of my life. Holy cow, my oldest fanfics could cast votes in elections with suffrage for those aged eighteen! Geez!

Anyways, there comes a point in all writers' careers where we've done what we've done, and then begins the painful process of editing. I'm talking the hard edit, that first real edit where you go back through, re-read everything several times, and then begin making the necessary changes to flesh out the story.

I recently finished the first draft of my original novel series--the whole thing, dang--back in September. The kit and kaboodle was something like 240,000 words in all, meant to become five enjoyable arcs or novels that could stand alone and tell one story! Writing that much text took me approximately two years, with many breaks in between.

The process to edit the first arc, which was previously much more brief, has taken SIX MONTHS. And that is just one hard edit! I've added about 30,000 words to it. The editing process is so exhausting. After editing, cleaning, editing, cleaning, editing, and cleaning, I finally sent the first arc to a peer for review. I'm really looking forward to feedback on the story, but it was a bit like sending my baby off to college

It's really interesting, not knowing exactly how a very good friend is going to react to it. I feel like I've really gotten to know the characters over the course of the story writing process. But, dang, it feels like the editing is never going to end. I started looking at Arc Two and added some needed introduction, as the decision to separate the book there was made after writing the chapter, but when I hit the third chapter of the arc, I just got frustrated. I realized, dang, this is some choppy work!! It's going to take so much massaging crappy material to get something good out of it.

Arc One still isn't as fleshed out as I'd like. The whole series takes place over about ten months, and Arc One covers three of them. To use a simple metric (Word page count), it's 102 pages total there, while the full document is about 740 pages. Necessarily, the end of the story involves more text over less time, and I don't want to fill in too much in the past chapters before the characters really grow around the third Arc. I feel like I'm adding to the more immature aspects of their lives rather than adding to their growth. The growth happens at certain points in response to important events which I am rather attached to, and I'd rather not change them just to flesh out the characters earlier. I just don't want to add more narration to the text, since I'm satisfied with the beginning and conclusion. I could add some mini-arc to introduce characters sooner and provide some catalyst for text, but I think there's rather a lot going on and the first arc needs to introduce the main cast, cementing them for the reader before giving the reader too many secondary characters to read about. (Could you imagine if, for example, Rowling had crammed every major character in her series into Sorcerer's Stone? If she had decided to write "Dolores Umbridge Meets a Cat" for the sake of adding page count?) I'm just concerned that this text is too brief is all.

Anyways, I'm really interesting in chatting with those of you who have finished a large body of work, fanfiction or not, and about this process. At what point did you feel ready to send parts of the text off for review? What do you like about the process? How much dicing and slicing do you typically do when you write?

xx Magmar