I've spent the last month and a half editing the dickens out of this thing. Or maybe I've been editing the Dickens into it, considering that it's getting longer, not shorter. I've done my best to eliminate typographical errors and inconsistent and excessive uses of em-dashes and ellipses. I've searched through the document to make sure my curly quotation marks close the right way, and expunged the extra spaces I keep tapping in after the last sentences of paragraphs. Then there's all the words and phrasings I've changed along the way, just because the new word or phrase is better.
And you know what? It's time to stop. I've got to send this latest, final version to my beta reader, and unless she comes up with some valid reason the text has to change, I have to say it's DONE.
Not that I can't improve it. Of course I can. But I have at least three other book projects to tackle. At my age I don't have the luxury of spending three or four years on a single novel, polishing it to death.
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