After about 100 pages of editing, my new Robert Champion crime novel Insure to Murder, I’m discovering that after about ten pages I start to get tired and have a hard time concentrating and making decisions about changes. I read every word and sentence looking for misspellings, errors in grammer and other language problems.
I also try to strenghten the prose and tighten up the meaning of a sentence if it sounds vague or fuzzy. I try to edit my work from the 30,000 foot point-of-view of the overall story beginning to end. Since I know the ending I can take out anything that might give away the ending.
There’s a lot of balls to keep in the air from the reuse of specific names for places like coffee shops and restaurants, to time lines of past events, to the sound of each character’s voice in the dialogue. It amounts to reimagining the story again.