So when it comes to my book project, it can finally be said that the book is more or less finished now. After spending two years working on it, the script was good enough to be sent to the publishers to evaluate whether it's good enough.
Project-wise, in reality it took way more work and effort than I had thought at first. I would never have thought that I'd have to do four full rewrites (3 months each) of the manuscript before the mistakes - big or small - in the story would be fixed.
Indeed, once I got my third rewrite of the script complete, I genuinely thought that it was ready to be sent to the publishers. I thought that I had finally noticed all the problems and that pretty much everything finally worked from start to finish.
In reality, though, once I started working on the fifth draft, I found that there were still problems. For the first time I saw that the pacing in the first chapter (35 pages total) was a bit off so I had to cut two small scenes that weren't needed and that slowed down the story.
Fortunately, once I got to the second chapter where the protagonist leaves Paris and the story gets going in Southern France, there weren't that many issues to worry about. I didn't have to cut scenes, which was an issue that I had already taken care of in earlier drafts.
Indeed, the next six or so chapters (2-7) were relatively simple to rewrite. Even though I had to make some small cuts here and there in order to make the story flow as well as possible, I didn't have any critical problems or issues here.
However, once we finally reached the last two chapters, that's when things got a bit tough again. Chapters eight and nine were the ones where the characters take part in a dangerous train operation where nazis transport art to Paris.
In this case, once I felt that the motivation for the protagonists to take part in the operation was a bit off exposition-wise, I had to fix that. Especially when it came to pages with critical exposition in it, that took more than a week to rewrite before it had a solid enough flow.
Fortunately (again), once I got this second critical moment in the story fixed (the catalyst in the first chapter being the other one), the rest wasn't that difficult. Even though the last two chapters took a lot of effort too, it was only a matter of putting in the hard work.
In that sense, once I got the fourth rewrite finished a week or so ago, I thought that it was finally time to send the script to the publishers. I thought that I had managed to make it good enough and that I shouldn't go for another round of rewrite.
After all, when you think about the story as a whole, even though there are probably still some tiny things that need to be fixed, as a whole it was time to take the next step. At some point I would have to send the manuscript it for an evaluation anyway.
In that sense, now that I've finally sent the book to the publishers, I hope that things go well here. I hope that good things happen, because even though it's not easy to get published, at least in my opinion the book that I wrote is more than good enough for that.
