Working on Edits!!!

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil." ~Truman Capote

I am furiously trying to finish up edits for Summer's Song today. The ebook doesn't release until mid-November, but today's my deadline for first-round edits, so it looks like the glorious sunshine and yardwork will have to wait. What did I struggle with most this time? Well, here are the major areas my editor wanted me to address:

Getting rid of filter words. Since the book is mostly written in deep POV, she doesn't like watched, realized, thought, felt, etc. Just state the emotion or the actual thought and get on with it. Example: He wasn't the most handsome man she'd ever seen, Summer thought, but something about Damian got under her skin and stayed there. Permanently. (eventually deleted all these kinds of "character thought..." tags)

Getting rid of extraneous dialogue tags. ("he said" etc). I guess I had a lot of them that I didn't really need. Funny -- I haven't had that problem in my earlier stuff, but then again, this is one of my earlier works, written back in 2002-2003.

Editing for continuity. I had a few errors in people's ages, vehicles, the timeline, etc. Nothing I couldn't iron out.

Inserting a previously deleted scene. This was the most challenging, since the editor wanted me to put back in a scene I had taken out (she read 2 versions of the story before offering me a contract). Of course, putting the scene back in meant also adjusting how it affected both earlier and later scenes, so....lots of work there.

Now I'm going through it one more time, revising anything I see that needs attention. Hoping to finish by this evening, but it's gonna be a challenge~