The Revision Journey

 When asked exactly what I was doing in revising The Third Face, I realized that I didn't have an answer. It's kind of like how a lot of inexperienced authors freeze up when they have to explain to someone what their novel is actually about (I had that for a long time and I'm just now overcoming it). Today, I'm going to try to actually answer that question.

Basically, I had three major goals in mind for this edition: to make it significantly longer, to re-center the book on Rasuke as a main character with clear growth, and to get rid of some other major plot issues that were bogging down the first edition.

If you're not too familiar with word counts, this might not mean anything to you, but before, The Third Face clocked in at about 25,000 words. To give you an idea, a lot of people claim that 50,000 words is barely enough to qualify as a novel. A young adult or teen novel can sometimes get away with as little as 30,000, but most readers expect more. In fact, in the paperback version, I used spacing and other cheap tricks to make the book appear bigger than it really was. That's bad, I know. Rather than hiding its skimpiness, I want to actually make it a good length, and my minimum target for it is 40,000 words. (You can see that right now on my little progress bar on the left side of the page!)

Another thing that I tried to do in earlier versions was to just not take traditional story structure seriously. At all. There's no reason for that. I just wasn't really paying attention. And it turns out that you can't just have a bunch of things happening that are related, throw in a few plot twists and lead up to a final battle and call it good. In a story like this one there is a hero, who beats personal challenges more or less at the same time as external ones. There's an overarching conflict that is built from caring what happens to this hero, and that slowly emerges at the beginning and carries all the way to the end. All subplots need to take a backseat to this. Thus, almost all of my jumps in perspective this time around function mainly to support the journey of Rasuke to self-understanding, and into his confrontation with the forces of the universe.

What else did I do to the story in the meantime? For one thing, there aren't as many major jumps in time as there were before. Whereas originally the prologue took place several years before Part 1, which in turn was a few years before Part 2, now these events are either made to happen one right after another, or presented in flashbacks. On the other hand, I eliminated a lot of the times when the characters are simply waiting around for something to happen to them, brooding on the many questions of the world and arguing with each other. Finally, I made sure that all of the main characters are properly introduced in the first ten chapters, rather than giving them only passing mentions until they suddenly appeared much later on.

It's amazing how this all comes together. There are a lot of other details that I'm messing with while I'm at it, but these important things are the focus of my work right now. I've been trying to get out a chapter every day, and to get around 1000 words out of each one. While I haven't been able to do that perfectly all the time, the fact remains that this story is hurtling towards completion faster than I could have dreamed. The end is a lot closer than you might think! I hope this post holds you over until then.