Editing: Vision More Glorious

My goal was to publish three novels in 2026, but as I wrote back in early June, my edit of The Man Terror Club did not go well. That put me behind, and I fear it will be impossible to publish more than two novels this year. I still have hope for early 2027, though, so I’m preparing the manuscript of Vision More Glorious, a romance/science fiction/thriller I wrote eight years ago, to go out for editing this summer or fall. Like all my early novels, it’s set in Japan. It tells the story of a young American man who has been depressed for years but overcomes the illness with the help of an experimental drug. Unfortunately, the drug has serious side effects, changes in vision being the first to appear, and the drug company turns out to know far too much about their development and danger. The main character finds himself in a race against time. It also deals with aspects of expatriate life in Japan.

It’s a fun book, but it’s 100,000 words. It has to be cut. Luckily for my darlings, it’s more overwritten than my more recent work. You might wonder how that could be a good thing. It makes it easier to drop the word count simply by cleaning up the prose. Eight years ago, I tended to explain things in too much detail, trying to make sure the reader would get what I meant. Now I trust readers more and try not to bury them in unnecessary words. As I read Vision, I’m also finding that the seeds of my too-long dialogue habit were already firmly planted eight years ago. None of my novels, however, are more dialogue-heavy than August’s first drafts, so I can apply my work trimming and massaging long dialogue there directly to Vision. The same goes for getting rid of “white room syndrome” and other problems I am just now overcoming.

The manuscript is not yet in the hands of an editor. I’m not sure whose calendar to try to get onto. But I hope to know a little more about my latest editor in the next couple of weeks. At that point, I should be able to give Vision to one of the editors I’ve worked with recently. If it sounds like the true mission here is not to get an edit so much as find a developmental editor I trust, you’d be exactly right.