Spires of Infinity rewrite Draft 3 done.

Soooooo, I've finally finished up the third draft of my Spires of Infinity rewrite, and if you feel the great urge, you can read it at the bottom of this page.  Like other recent projects I've posted, this is written in manuscript format, because converting it to something more normal looking to post on my website takes way too much time and effort.  This means 12 point font, double spaces, all itallics are underlined instead of itallicized, and all blank lines are marked with a #.

Anyway, my goal with this draft was to tighten up the writing, remove any unneeded repetition, fill in a few plot holes, and shave the word count down to about 90k words.  I have to say, that this draft was pretty mind-numbing.  I had to reread every single chapter in this story 5-6 times, going over every single little word and thinking to myself, hmmmmmm, is there any way I can say this in fewer words until I was satisfied I'd done as much as I could.  There were a few instances of repetition that I removed, a bunch of adverbs, because as Stephen King so aptly says, the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I did my best to shave the word count down as much as possible, without hurting the integrity of the story, or the characters.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to cut the word count down as much as I wanted to.  I was hoping for 90k, and ended up at 99k.  The writing was actually pretty tight to begin with, and there wasn't much I could shave off, plus filling in some plot holes required adding text.  Things are about as tight as I can get them now, and it IS still 4k words shorter than it was, so I feel like I did well with this draft, if I didn't quite end up with exactly what I wanted.

I've got to say, this story has come a LONG way from the story I first envisioned 6 or 7 years ago.  I basically threw out the entire premise the entire story was revolving around, and that turned out to be exactly what it needed to be a better story.  I'm really happy with how it's turning out.  I think I'll probably only need another quick draft or two before it's done, and I start trying to sell it.