Before we moved, I finally finished going through the entire manuscript of my work in progress and doing a complete revision. I've never been a good reviser, though I trust I'm getting better with age.
Once here and mostly settled, I finished typing up that new draft and then went through the end product, making notes, correcting typos, and outlining, chapter by chapter, to see if there were any structural problems. And all in all, I'm really pleased with what the second draft (that took about four years to complete - ouch!). I made some major changes in the middle - changed up characters, delved further into backstory, restructured three chapters - and they've worked a great improvement on the novel as a whole. Of course, now all the new material needs a layer of polish, which is partly what Draft #3, which I began two days ago, will hopefully accomplish.
But I was also really pleased to see that chapters where I thought I'd made very few changes - pruning here, making description a bit more original there - were actually much stronger than they had been before.
All those small changes (and big ones), I think, have added up to a much stronger book, one that I really enjoyed reading again. So, once Draft #3 is done (and I do have a couple ideas for some more substantive changes there too), perhaps I will have to begin researching literary agents and such. I guess we'll see.
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