We have no cats, Kathleen!

I don't know if this is the right edit to do. But I can't look back.

Well, sure, technically I could. I have a saved copy, and the software I'm using allows me to do a line-by-line comparison. What is more accurate is that it doesn't make sense, not to me as a working artist, to do this. I can barely justify the edits I'm making. I can't justify double-thinking them.

And really, these aren't the edits I want to make. I want to focus in, but it can't be done without starting nearly from scratch. I can look back and I can say having a protagonist who knows a lot less out the outset, and who has more wrong ideas she has to unlearn, would be stronger. And to keep things hyper-focused on classical Greece (and some contemporary Greece), even past the point of realism; every name is a classical allusion, for instance.

Sure, I have two ships with names and one is Hermes and the other is Queen Parsisphae but... (and the bar on the Queen is named Metamorphoses...which is a reference not a lot of people are going to get, even if at the end of it I name-drop Circe.)

Thing is, Alexander and Macedon, the Roman Empire, and the Minoans (and Atlantis) are embedded so deeply in the plot as plotted I can't take them out or substitute them. Ariadne and the Atlantis Gallery are too central. The reception scene at the gallery is constructed around an Atlantis story.

It's too much to take out. So instead I'm chopping out the shorter bits. Any time I name-drop a historical incident or a location or a pop culture reference that can be excised without spilling blood, out it goes.

But I'm not replacing them with anything. So what I'm doing in effect is making the the story less rich. And, yes, having that stuff in there was intentional when I did it. I wanted to put across that my protagonist is well-read and that the world refuses to be simple. In fact, in the re-write I actually added a bit about the Frankish Tower, which a Victorian German (Heinrich Schliemann) demolished in his quest to restore the Athenian Acropolis to a Periclesian form.

That interplay and communication between different peoples and nations and periods and beliefs is a core element of the story. So going through and randomly taking out sentences that dared include "Byzantine" is not necessarily an improvement to the manuscript. Heck, I'm even intending to chop out "frustuck" when I get there (there is another reason; it allows me to move the bit to the Berlin novel).

***

I'm on slightly more sure ground with the other edits I'm doing. Basically my sentence structure can be garbage. I am conscious of Penny having a faux-naive voice, and putting on more of an academic/pedantic air when playing Athena Fox, but the narration -- which should straddle both -- slides too often into the merely inefficient or even convoluted.

Just this morning at the cafe -- the only productive part of this particular day -- I took an axe to;

One or two had bits of medieval garb on them. I caught a glimpse of a Mjolnir amulet around one neck. Asatru? Or maybe he was just really excited about the next Avengers movie. The scatter on the tables said they’d arrived before us and had been here long enough to privately celebrate what it was they’d accomplished. 

And replaced it with;

One or two had bits of medieval garb on. I caught a glimpse of a Mjolnir amulet. Pagan? Or maybe he was just really excited about the next Avengers movie. The litter on the tables said they’d arrived before us and had been here long enough for their own private champagne party.

And I'm on an adjective hunt. I had the wind put up me on those after a couple of discussions at Quora about dialogue tags. I'm lopping off every adjective that sticks its head out far enough for me to notice it.

It still isn't good. But I don't have, again, the heart or patience to do the whole thing. I already ran it through grammar check and multiple edit passes and one-and-a-fraction beta readers. I'd rather not create a whole new set of errors that need fixing.

Honestly, I'd rather write the next one. So I'm going to be very happy to get done with this edit and go back to that.