I’ve been working on a round of edits for Angel of Death. I say “I”, but the lion’s share of the work was done by my mother-in-law, Sharon Davis. As if I wasn’t indebted to her enough. Anyway, I intend to have the novel up shortly as a full file.

Since I was under the hood anyway, I’ve gone through and switched it from 21 chapters to 70. These chapters breaks were mostly obvious. I noticed their need when I went back and read the whole novel as I would any other book. When I wrote AoD, I structured the novel around 20 different chunks of text, each about 5k words long. But when I went back and read the book, these divisions were neither clear, nor necessary. Now the chapters are much shorter, and cleaner; most are under 2k words, with two just a few paragraphs long. All the breaks, save two, come at natural points in the story. The two additional chapters break up some fairly long scenes (3500 words of more), and happen at points where some sort of a gap should work. Mind you, I’m guessing here; I have a strong sense of what works as a voracious reader, but I’m not anything like a professional editor, and will not take on that mantel to suit my own selfish needs.

The best part of working with Sharon was sitting down with her, and trying to figure out the proper spelling for “pinche pendejo”, and “culo”. Its not every day one gets to use such words around their mother-in-law, and get away with it.