Meanwhile, In Editing Land

As of ten days ago, the first draft of The Last God is finished. Which, as you've probably gathered from the title of this post, means I'm now shaping that messy lump of clay into a draft that's more organized, detailed, and coherent.

Having done this a few times now, I have to say that this is probably the cleanest and most complete from beginning to end first draft I've done so far. That only took...ten novels.

So far my major issues seem to be:

- Changing the spelling of several names between the beginning and the end. Thank goodness for find/replace. Except when you change a character name from Lex to Logan and end up with WTF words like compLoganion. Good thing this is only the second draft so I can catch these things before other eyes suffer from my bad habits.

- Sowing details about characters that never pop up again. I wrote the whole novel and then, going back to the beginning, realized I'd given one of the characters a first name that only gets used once.  Another has several abilities that never ended up being utilized, amongst other things.

- Dropping details of important events that never get resolved. After an enemy attacks and is defeated. Their space ship was never mentioned again. Were there people still on it? Did they leave? Are the good guys towing it around? Maybe it evaporated?

So yes, some cleaning going on and a good deal of better stitching events and motivations together as well. The bones are there though, and this is the least amount of rewriting I've ever had to do...so far. I say this as I launch into chapter four. Though, the beginning is usually the roughest part-where I was finding the story and learning the characters. I'm feeling pretty good about the rest. And now I've just cursed myself. Crap. I'm going to stop talking now.