It has taken longer than I had anticipated to assemble and incorporate the edits from my beta-readers. Part of the struggle was working around my daughters' schedules for school work and other activities. In the past, I was able to have my beta readers working in series: one would read through the entire draft, I'd incorporate their edits, then the next one would read. This year there's been a lot of overlap between each edit.
So I've finally reached the milestone where I can say that one of my beta-readers finished and all of their edits have been incorporated. For lack of anything better, I'll refer to this as the 6th draft. The word count has grown from 133,000 for the 5th draft, to 134,000 today. Some words and paragraphs needed to be added, some removed - but overall a small change. My other two daughters (who are also beta-reading the book) are coming along right behind.
