The Editing Collage

Editing.  Is it just me or does it sometimes feel like making a collage?  You snip bits from here and there to make a whole picture.  Sometimes you toss the bits aside, never to be used again.  Other times those bits you snipped are just right for adding back in later. 

That's where I'm at with Djinnocide.  I thought I was done.  Then I looked at it again with a careful - and objective, I hope - eye to what a fresh reader might see when they crack the book.  Low and behold, the whole beginning was stilted and choppy.  Snip, snip, snip.  Add in little pieces of what was snipped.  Voila!  The prologue or preface or whatever that was, is gone.  Bits of it are now woven into the whole.  Chapter One is now as perfect as the following chapters.  Yay me.

Anyway, I'm doing one final pass over the whole thing to make sure everything is as cohesive as I thought it was several weeks ago, and then this puppy is going out into Queryland.  I'm excited.  I'm also a bit barfy about the whole idea.  But them's the breaks.

Does editing feel like making a collage to you?  Or is your editing more like photoshopping a picture?  Personally, I'm usually in the photoshop camp, but right now, it's more like a collage.