And that’s a question I used to struggle with: How do you know you’re done with the first round of revisions? Lately, the answer is when I’m ready to show it to my girlfriend. After she’s done reading the book it’s going off to the beta readers. After that, I plan to use pre-orders to judge how much money I want to spend on editorial services, at which point I hope most of the developmental stuff will be done.
I still don’t have a marketable description for Corpus Evil, but I’ll talk a little more about it here. It was originally intended to be a short story about a group of teenagers who uncover an ancient evil in an abandoned church camp. Considering I had just spent five or six years working on an absurdly complicated science fiction novel, the story was extremely easy to write by comparison. (The biggest problem with the science fiction novel was I never set deadlines or limits on the revision period… the damn thing just ballooned and ballooned after the first draft was completed. I learned a lot, but I suspect I wasted a lot of my time, too.)
Immediately after finishing the short story, which was called Church Camp at the time, I began working on another short story. About two pages into it I realized the main character of the new story could be one of the survivors from the previous story, all grown up. Once again, the story nearly wrote itself. Meanwhile, I began to wonder: What happened to the other survivors?
I think the most honest ending in a horror movie was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which leaves its heroine screaming at the brink of irreparable insanity. Events like that tend to fuck people up. If your characters are mentally unscathed by the end of your horror tale, you’re either cheating your audience or kidding yourself.
The first part of Corpus Evil is the massacre, so to say. The rest of the book explores what happens next.
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