Daughter of Mystery: End of the Beginning

Four years ago (though it seems longer) I began a new writing project. Like all my fiction projects, it started with an "emotional postcard": a snapshot of a scene involving a few characters, a scenario, and a strong emotional "feel" for what was going on. And like all my fiction projects, one primary purpose of the story is to create a context in which that "emotional postcard" has a context and meaning. But one other thing I wanted to do was to engage in an entirely new (for me) writing process -- to see if changing how I wrote would affect what I wrote, especially in terms of the complexity, overall coherence, and consistency of the story.

I think it worked.

About half an hour ago, I finished the (very rough) first draft of Daughter of Mystery. If I may say so myself, I think it's the best thing I've ever written, even in its current state. (And it's still a long ways from being ready for test-readers.) And now I get to start revising.

The Revision Plan

Just for fun, here are the layers I need to cover in the revisions:
1. Labels -- there are still lots of personal and place names I need to come up with, as well as a bunch of specialized vocabulary around the magico-religious system.
2. Continuity -- various plot details got changed during the writing process but I didn't want to get bogged down going back and updating everything at the time.
3. Placeholders -- while my general rule was that I had to write everything, first-to-last, without skipping, there were several places where I needed a descriptive section that was so technically complex that it was really going to mess up my momentum at the time.
4. Texture -- various elements need to be covered/mentioned more consistently or continuously (people who seem to disappear for long periods of time then pop up again, habitual experiences that only get mentioned when plot-relevant). In some cases I may determine the current coverage is ok, but it needs to be reviewed.
5. POV -- I'm trying to do something very specific with how I handle point of view, but occasionally I found myself slipping. This needs to be reviewed very carefully. One aspect of POV is that I made extensive usage of how each character addresses, refers to, and thinks about other characters depending on relationship and emotional state. I think that part is probably pretty solid, but I want to look at it systematically.
6. Description -- unless I'm really keeping a handle on it, I tend to slip into a very dialog-and-movements focused text and let the description slide. I need to make sure that I have sufficient descriptive passages properly distributed.
7. All that other copyediting stuff and anything else I've forgotten.