The sequel is finished!

Today I turned in the final draft of the sequel to Adaptation! Here's a photo of the manuscript:

That's part of the reason I disappeared from my website for the last week. The other reason? I was deathly ill. It didn't hit me until after all my fun events in New York City (which I will post photos of soon), but when it struck, it totally knocked me out. Unfortunately I also had to finish those revisions to the sequel. So the last week I was ensconced in one corner of my sofa (because working at my desk seemed way too horrible) with the manuscript, my green pen, my thesaurus and dictionary, Kleenex and cough drops and endless cups of medicinal tea.

It was not the ideal revising experience, but being sick did prove useful in that everything that wasn't related to revision was promptly ignored. For the last week, all I did was think about the words in this book. I deleted a lot of completely useless "she saids" and "justs" and repeated phrases. (Wow, there were a lot.) I tried to dot every I and cross every T when it came to the plot. (Wow, there was a lot of plot.) And I'm really pleased with this book, which I have managed to write in ten months. TEN MONTHS PEOPLE. This is not a speed at which I am normally accustomed to writing novels!

Here are some stats, updated to reflect this draft:

Word count of Draft #3: 118,633 Word count of Draft #2: 121,500 Word count of Draft #1: 93,300

Total number of days spent on revision (so far): 68 Number of days spent on draft #3: 17 Number of days spent on draft #2: 51 Number of days spent writing draft #1: 61

Next up is copyediting, when a copyeditor goes through my manuscript to find spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors. The copyeditor also makes sure the plot details line up and things happen on the correct days.

Next up for me? Well, I'm going to take the night off and have a lovely codeine-laced nightcap so I can sleep for a long, long time. Then I will resume my normal blogging duties, because hey, Adaptation just came out! I have many more Adaptation events coming up, and I'm looking forward to doing them without the revision deadline hanging over my head.

More tomorrow!