A Just Update

After 17.5 hours of edits on Conventional Demon, I think this book is as polished as it's going to get. Bring on the submissions, Harper Voyager. I'm ready.

I did a lot of subtle trimming this round. A sentence removed here, a paragraph there, a few words here and there. Nothing major. I don't think there's anything major left. I've been through this book more than a dozen times. More than 20 times. I've lost count. The fact that I'm calling this "Draft 6" reflects only the number of times I've done major rewrites.


This was the round of edits where I did a search for my trigger words. I made some progress.

Number of instances in which these words were removed:

• Simply: 7
• Definitely: 12
• Just: 103

I'm especially proud of those 103 deleted just instances. (Sadly, my new simply word count had gone up by 1, so I had to do another round of searches and deletes.)

With all the trimming, I brought the novel down 1,749 words. That's more than a typical day's worth of writing for me.

Conventional Demon is a lean, clean, lighthearted urban fantasy ready to find its publisher. Wish me luck!