I'm Baaaaaack!

Sorry for the long silence--I had to ask for a tiny extension on my revisions due to a surprise root canal. I love surprises. Just not when they're root canals... Soooo. About the revisions (which are offically completed and turned in). I know I mentioned before about the 4 page editorial letter. I thought it was mostly minor issues, tweaking, re-touching. But when I went back through the MS with fresh eyes, I realized it was major revisions, and some of those not even in the editorial letter. In a way, I performed a root canal on my MS. It was still mostly my original, but I gutted it and re-made it, only better and stronger than the original. I cut 18k words and wrote 17k words to replace those. I cut scenes I loved, but they did nothing to move the plot forward. Then I replaced them with scenes I loved more, scenes that worked like a donkey for the plot. And I'm really, really excited about it. I wanted to share something I found very helpful in this process. I created an excel spreadsheet to document my revisions. The left colum indicated the chapter number. The middle column told a short synopsis of the content of each chapter. The right one indicated what needed to be changed in that chapter, if anything. As I went through and revised, I replaced what needed to be changed with a description of what actually changed, and I notated the page numbers for reference. This will help you when you turn in your revised MS--outlining all the changes for your editor saves him/her a big chunk of time for the re-read. What about you? What editing advice do you have? I'd love to know!