Well, you finally made it to the end of your book. Congratulations! You deserve a little time off. That's right--take a break to celebrate your accomplishmentr, have a glass of champagne, and treat yourself to a nice dinner. Put the story away for at least a week or two and try not to think about it.

When you get ready to work on it again, take the time to read the manuscript slowly from beginning to end. Make mental notes of what works and what doesn't. Then read it again, and on the second time around, mark what you think are any problem areas. This is the time to look at the total project. Does the story work?

Revising gives you the chance to reflect on the entire narrative, and the editing process is a good time to consider what the story is all about. How it moves from beginning to end. You no longer have to worry about where it's going; you just want to make sure the going will hold the reader's attention.

Ask yourself, are the characters believable? Do they retain their unique individuality throughout? Be on guard for secondary characters that take up too much room in the story.

Take a close look at your chapter breaks. Are they correctly placed? Is there a natural pause between them?

You might want to take a look at your pacing of the story, making sure that the chapters flow smoothly into each other. Be on guard for two slow moving sections together. Your reader might fall asleep. You want to keep the pace moving and the pages turning.

This is the time to go over each scene, sentence by sentence, making sure the flow is smooth. You might wind up moving a sentence or a paragraph or even a whole chapter to give them more force.

Now comes the time when you may want to cut parts--repetitive words, sections, even whole chapters from your book. Be ruthless. If the story isn't dramatically moved forward by a particular scene, cut it. If you are using the same adverbs over and over, cut them. Sharpen up the action. Tightening the whole manuscript can make an enormous difference. By the same token, some scenes, sentences or chapters may need a bit of expanding to make them more powerful.

Watch out for repetitions, especially with unusual words. They can be distracting as the reader goes along and become tedious if used too often. Make sure you do not repeat the same adjectives over and over. Don't repeat statements excessively: we know she had red hair and a wicked temper, you told us that in the first chapter, we don't need to be reminded again and again. We want examples of how that wicked temper manifests itself.

Save your revision and mark the file as version 2. That way you have the file of your original manuscript intact to refer back to if you realize you cut something important.

The editorial process can be painful as you go along, sometimes deleting entire sections or characters who don't matter to the story. However, there is an immense satisfaction in completing the first serious revision of your manuscript, so celebrate yourself and your accomplishment.