Today is a bit of a funny day, so I decided to do some editing. At the time, I was kind of surprised how far into the book I had gotten editing wise.
I am also horrified at how much extra work/chapters I keep adding.
When I edit, I have a few duties I try to do. These are as follows:
Check continuity
Catch weird spelling/grammar
Adjust pacing where need be
The third one is the problem child. You see, prior to this I would predominantly write drabbles that would be anywhere between 20-5000 words in length. As a result, the pacing of a novel-sized text is not something I've had to think about at any point in my writing.
Granted, I read a lot of books and have gone "oh boy this is SLOW" or "oh shit I guess this a race now", so I can identify pacing issues. Applying it to the novel though has been, at times, a nightmare.
During draft 1, I and the others would write disjointedly because it made getting the words down easier. We all wrote at different times and for different lengths, so it made sense.
Sometimes I would write drabbles like I normally did to explore the characters, and they would just end up in the book. When that happened, I would try to "stitch up" the bits I wrote to make sense in the story we had written so far. It's only in drafts 2 and 3 I've started to do things in order. As a result, there are some chapters with some wild pacing.
At least four times during editing Draft 3, I have split one massive, long chapter into 2 more easy to consume chapters. Conversely, I've found thin, sad chapters I've had to plump up with character moments and hints of back story. I'm not even the only member of the team doing this - @fioriisketches wound up doing the same "split the big chapter" approach when fixing up a late game chapter where Makoto has a run in with the culprit.
Why am I bringing this up? Well, every time I go to look at the chapter list to see how far along I am in the editing process, I notice that I am adding more chapters to edit, and thus can't just count how many chapters are left.
I am firmly in the end of Act 2/start of Act 3 turf, but oh my god, it is both funny and horrifying how much more writing we've ended up with in my attempts to make the pace quicker at times.
