Jane – yeah, when you’re unpubbed I think, you sub the very best you can do. But you don’t know ultimately whether what you’ve written is acceptable editor-wise until they tell you. I think Harlequin are very particular about what they want, hence the revisions!

Though it seems to me that most romance rewrites are to do with plot and narrative structure, and how editors think they can be improved. And while I do the best I can do on my own, what an individual editor thinks can be improved is not something over which I have any control!

I guess one day the order to rewrite will finally arrive, and I’ll just have to suck it up. 😉

Since mine are mostly bites or briefs, 15K is a manageable figure..

But I cant escape “revisions” once published right 🙂 I have seen many pubbed authors agonising over revisions too..But then the best is what is expected as a writer- in your works and in your books.

So revisions I would say – are most essential – even though it is a bitter pill.

Kerrin – you’re like me! I never get rid of anything entirely either. I cut all my uneeded text and put it into kind of out-takes document. Very useful to pillage for other mss. Glad you got the meter working.

Joanne – if your rewrites are working then you are producing! No writing is ever wasted, be it rewriting or getting that word count up.

Jane – you’re a lucky woman. No rewrites sounds fab! I could not rewrite stuff of course, and just write something new but I love my characters. And I feel it’s actually quite good practice to see if I can make a story that wasn’t working right, work properly. And in effect, they are brand new stories really, only the names are the same. 🙂

I feel bad about admitting this, but I was never asked to rewrite any of the six books I published with Virgin. And I only did single line copy-editing changes with my novel for Sceptre.

But the bottom line is, if I’d been asked to do rewrites, I would have done them. Because otherwise I wouldn’t have got paid!

My accepted MS, His Virgin Acquisition was half rewritten and this one is getting the full treatment. But my heroine especially has changed so much, and I love her so much for it, that she really needed the freedom to be the new her, and a rewrite was the best thing for it.

I’ve had such good experiences, and such positive feedback from my ed, over rewrites that I highly recommend them. 😉

And Suzanne, are you not supposed to sub first drafts?? LOL. No, really, thank God my editor is so nice because my sub was essentially a first draft. It never even occurred to me to rewrite before I sent…hey, I did spellcheck. All that to say the editors are actually very nice, patient type people!