Another draft finished. One more to go?

I'm working on two GIANT related items right now - one is finding and agent / publisher, the other is writing. Having just come from the writing desk, I'll speak about writing here.

I finished up the last draft quicker than I though - it was short - only dealing with four or five chapters, but two of those were completely new. It turned out the newest chapters were the easiest to edit - there was little change needed. It was mostly pacing, dialog and typo pickups. It leads me to think that I'm finally figuring out how to write. I've read a lot of 'how I write books' lately - all by established authors. Everyone of them says they only have three or so big drafts of their novels. That worried me - I've at least doubled that number. I knew that everyone works differently and I'm still early in my writing development, but still . . . So finding those new chapters in great shape boosted my confidence.

The other half of the edit was more rigorous, but well worth it. I had earlier made hand edits to the first few chapters of the second section of the book. The chapters were really suffering from poor flow, bad description, and a serious case of Boring. I cut a ton out of the paragraphs and rearranged a lot of what was left to really pick up the pacing. Additionally strengthened the back story and main character's motivation.

After all this I started a new draft for the cleanup last pass before I start shopping this around. Though all my paragraphs were not indented and had spaces between them. This made it handier to print and correct and had a good look on the screen, but needed to be standardized. It took about an hour and a half to indent all the paragraphs - in the end I took out 30 of 249 pages just by removing white space. Whew. In a few weeks I'm going to sit back down and start the typo pass.