Finished the initial stage of editing Lowborn a few minutes ago, which involved going back through a few chapters and adding some spice to the descriptions of the setting. It actually wasn’t as sparse as I thought it was.
Now, I’m going to do the first full read from beginning to end, to check the pacing. Odds are that I’ll do more tweaking along the way. After that, I’ll let it sit for a couple of days.
Here’s hoping you don’t find much you need to tweak; it’s a sign that you’re getting better as a writer when you find little that needs to be changed.
Now, whether or not something NEEDS to be changed is totally different from whether or not you THINK it should be changed, so that’s a bit of a head-scratcher…
There usually aren’t major story changes. By the time I consider something finished as a first draft, I’ve usually made any of those changes already. I read back through things all the time, adding and removing things for the sake of continuity and pacing, before moving forward with a story.
By the time I consider something in the editing stage, it’s pretty much ready to run through the gauntlet of spell/grammar checkers, have a cold read or two, and go to Roust for a second set of eyes. It’s only when the story is long like this that it takes more than a day or two to go from first draft to submission.