Mid Novel Correction

​On August 10th I posted an article about my experience working with my publisher to evaluate the first 2/3 of my manuscript.  If you recall my primary question to my publisher was on point of view and how to push the story along to its conclusion.
I learned that I needed to make major changes in the first ten chapters to ground the story and let readers understand the conflicts in the protagonist, Ian Murphy’s, life.  I gave myself a few days to consider how to best undertake this job.
I decided to print out the first ten chapters and give myself time for a read through.  I had to take on the role of a first time reader and use the notes from the publisher as a guide to what was missing.  I had to admit that the context needed was in my head, it just didn’t make it to the written page.
Next I found a red pen and left the house for my favorite coffee shop to read through the first ten chapters with the intent of adding detail.  I slipped into punctuation.  I just couldn’t help myself.  I worked very hard to reel myself in and focus on content.
With intensity and focus I did discover some gaps, especially in how Ian reacts to the death of his long time friend, Kieran Fitzpatrick.  Ian feels that Kieran’s death releases him from his past.  At the first writing I didn’t realize that myself.
I also examined the relationship between Ian and his wife, Mairin.  My publisher felt their relationship was too perfect that I wasn’t allowing Mairin to have real emotions and reactions to some of Ian’s issues.  Again, by reading the manuscript for content I had to agree.  My Mairin was only two dimensional and didn’t express herself.  With the re-write, Mairin has a distinct voice and doesn’t hesitate to let Ian know exactly how she feels.
It took about a week to complete the re-write on hard copy.  I completed putting the changes into the document in a single morning.  In the re-writing process I cut out a quite a few paragraphs but I also added new material. 
I checked my word count.  When I took the detour to re-write I had written 64,488 works.  With all the edits my word count was 64,561 a net increase of only 73 words.  In the editing process it felt like I was adding a lot of words – wrong .  That’s how it goes.