A partner at the firm I once worked for insisted that "writing is revising." It's true, but sometimes more true than other times.

A few weeks ago, I turned in one of my larger Paizo freelance assignments: three of the tombs in the upcoming Tombs of Golarion book. I thought each of them was quite good, in its own way, with some flavorful maps. I received an email about a week ago asking for a rewrite of one of the tombs. The map wasn't large enough--and the new map necessitated several new rooms without an increase in word count--and they considered the villain just too silly (oh, Raspjaw, you will see the light of day somewhere, I promise you!). They asked me to redraft it, and asked in a very pleasant and professional way (they wanted to ensure that the work showed my voice, and not theirs, in the final product).

The rewrite was much more onerous than I'd anticipated. Adding several new rooms necessitated going back and redrafting all of the other rooms in order to reduce their wordcount. The redrawing of the map meant going through it all again, in order to make sure all the cross-references and such were corrected. Finally, you can't just swap out one final villain for another; that carries changes through the motivation and placement of everyone else, and that required substantial redrafting as well. So in the end, I'd rewritten or re-edited all of it. It was an entirely different animal by the time I was done. A better product? Yes, certainly, although I'm worried that in tightening the screws of the word count, the tomb lost a bit of its charm. We'll see what people think about it when it's released early next year.