Editing on Cerulean Bound proceeds at … I want to say a “good clip,” but realistically it’s more a slow crawl. I had started November with the intention of getting the second draft done by mid-December (a.k.a. right now) but then I got laser eye surgery and things went a tad sideways.
Long story short, either the LASIK people didn’t do the surgery correctly, or my eyes are just being difficult, because my vision never got up to 20/20. It’s supposed to take a couple of days to clear up after the surgery, but by seven days out, I was still seeing blurry. The surgeon says I’ve “regressed,” which is supposedly something that usually happens around the 3 or 6 month mark, so I guess I’m just special. This means I’ll have to go for a touch-up surgery in the spring, and until then the world is ever-so-slightly out of focus. I can still drive, but the signs are blurry, and I have to make the text on my screen bigger so I can read it.
All this is to say that my editing plans got completely derailed by the surgery, and I couldn’t properly read (let alone edit) for a good two weeks after the surgery. Then my eyes had a bad reaction to the steroid drops (because of course they did) and that knocked off another week of productivity. By the time I got properly into editing, it was basically December.
But! Now I’m back home in Ontario for the holidays, so I have a good two hours every morning of (relative) peace and quiet to get my editing done. There are the occasional (read: frequent) interruptions from my father, who’s very excited that I’m home, but they’re brief so I can usually get back into the editing groove without too much trouble.
As of today, I have officially knocked 10k words off my whopping 142k first draft word count. Now, YA books are generally between 70k-100k words, so I still have a ways to go, but I’ve been able to streamline scenes and even delete a few extraneous characters, so I’m hopeful I’ll be able to get down into the 110k words zone by the end of this edit. That leaves 10k-15k for my editor to chop, which is fine, because my editor loves chopping. If editing doesn’t work out for her, she’d make an excellent lumberjack.
That’s all! Just wanted to check in and let my devoted fans (all six of them) know that I have not, in fact, forgotten about book 3. I’m hard at work, and am doing my best to get it ready for a Spring 2018 release. Stay tuned, and stay awesome!
Michelle Proulx - Author 
Go Team Proulx!
Woohoo! It’s a bit awkward when a third of Team Proulx is actively trying to distract another third of Team Proulx from getting any work done whatsoever (“It’s Christmas! We should be going for walks in the freezing cold, not sitting at our computers!”), but we are a resilient sort so we will pull through.
I’m one of the six, it seems (you sure you didn’t mean six hundred or more?) so I’m thrilled to hear that. Not so thrilled about the eyes news, though. Do glasses help? My own eyes have been giving me grief these last few years, mostly because I strain them so much, but also because I’m getting older (or so my optician tells me, the old fool. And to think we were classmates). I hope the whole situation clears up in no time (silly pun intended).
Glasses do help — basically the LASIK just made my prescription a lot better, so I’ve been using my Dad’s driving glasses when I take the car out and that makes the world clearer. And my optometrist did offer to write me a prescription for glasses — the problem is that glasses usually run a couple hundred bucks, and I won’t need them in 3-6 months because I’ll be getting the touch-up surgery which will (hypothetically) eliminate the need for glasses entirely. So what he basically said to me was: “If you can read, and you can drive, then you can probably get by without glasses.” Both of which I can do (with slight difficulty), so I’m saving my cash and muddling through in a slightly blurry world 🙂
Meh, clarity is overrated anyway 🙂
Good luck with the editing. I hope your eyes get better.
Thanks — on both counts! My eyes have at least stopped getting random bright flares (I had an allergic reaction to the steroid drops post-surgery), so that’s mainly what I’m excited about. And then the touch-up surgery in 3 – 6 months should hypothetically fix my eyes for good. Assuming I’m not in the 2% who have to go in a third time, lol.