First revision of Jack O'Lantern complete

Today I finished my first pass of editing on Jack O'Lantern. It's amazing how much lousy writing I found when I read it. But at the same time, I found some real gems in there. Reading through and making the notes about what needed to be corrected was the easy part. Getting in there and actually doing the editing was difficult, and not fun. It got discouraging after awhile. Editing focuses on the bad writing, after all, and then fixing it. And so when I went through page after page, and saw the mistakes pile up, the poor sentences compound, and the just plain "what was I thinking?" moments keep coming, I got discouraged. I'd work on 20-30 pages at a time, and then just shove it aside when I hit a hard part. But the manuscript was always there, always nagging at me to get back to it.

Now I'm done with that first editing pass. And there's still so much more editing and revising to do. There's at least one whole chapter that I need to add, to flesh the story out a little. There are probably a lot of little details I could use to put in, things to make the story and world come alive. But hell, at this point, I'm happy. Another major step in the writing process complete.