I’m now four chapters into the first-pass edit of my novel, the goal of which is cutting out any obviously unnecessary text and just getting an initial feel for if the plot and character arcs hang together and make sense. I’ve been a bit surprised by how familiar these first few chapters are, and how little I’ve actually managed to cut – I can only guess that I reworked them quite a lot last year, before I moved to my later approach of just hammering out the scenes and not even reading them afterwards.

I’m expecting that’ll change soon: I’ve got my eye on chapter seven, which I think is about 3,000 words of nothing relevant to the plot happening, just some slow-burn character development. Pretty sure I’ll be able to tighten that up to about 1,500 and merge it with chapter six.

Editing’s fun!