On Revising (Part 2)
How often should you revise your work before it goes to a publisher or agent?
My advice on that is this; pick a number that seems reasonable, then add at least two more to it.
One of the things that I noticed about software is how they keep putting out new versions of older programs. Windows 1.0 becomes 5.0, Firefox is 1.0 first, and now, I believe, it's on to 42.0 or something of that nature. (I remember a joke in Douglas Coupland's novel Microserfs, his study of Silicon Valley tech culture in the early 1990's, where coders call their kids 2.0. That's still one of my favorite books of my 20's.)
Inspired by this, I decided that whenever I write manuscripts, I will stick to this numbering format to keep track of which versions are which. With The Holy Fool, I am now technically on version 3.6. That reflects four revisions of various levels and depths from the original rough draft.
As far as your work goes, I think there should be a reasonable medium between…
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