After working through the beta readers’ comments on the first draft, I solicited another review from someone who hadn’t seen the manuscript before. This isn’t a beta reader exactly. Is there such a thing as a gamma-reader?

The reviewer had some insightful comments, and it took me a while to puzzle over some of them. Somehow it gets harder and harder to make changes, because everything in the narrative is so interrelated (by design) that changing one thing sometimes sets off a cascade of changes. Some suggestions caused me to add new scenes and tweak existing ones, which took a while. Then I read the entire thing out loud (which took about a week). Reading out loud is the only way I find the most insidious typos and tighten up the dialogue.

This revision process took far longer than I originally thought. But I figure if it took me six years to finish the manuscript (first draft), that it’s worth taking time for revision. Revising taught me some things about pacing and suspense that weren’t obvious when writing one chapter at a time. I hope I can internalize those lessons, so that next time, I do a better job on the first draft.