Tonight I finished the fourth revision of The Scribe of Irohila, a novel I wrote in 2001. Sorry to say, I feel I must revise it again. It is getting close to completion, but I’ll be checking for a lot of useless words and double checking that all the characters are consistent. I also need to add some descriptions. It seems that a writer’s work is never done! Of course one of these days I’ll have to give it up, send it to publishers, and concentrate on something else, but for now, I’m still sure I’ve got work to do.

For example, the word “just” is practically useless. I scanned the entire manuscript for the word, and found it way too many times. Even though I know it is a useless word that has almost no place in a novel, I’d skipped over it about two dozen times during this last revision. With my scan, I deleted almost every “just” I found, though I kept a few I thought were appropriate.

This time I wrote a summary of each chapter as I read through the manuscript. These summaries are version one of my synopsis. My next project will be to revise the synopsis until it sounds like an exciting novel any agent or editor would love to read more of. I’ll do that and start revision five.

The Scribe of Irohila starts out slow and ends up as an exciting, eventful novel that’s hard to put down. I love the characters and the locations, and everything about this novel. I look forward to the day I feel ready to share it with the world.