Leave Society third draft

I finished the third draft of my novel today. It's 1952 words or 2.4% shorter than the second draft. I worked on the third draft from July 29 to August 25. It's in four parts. I read and edited the first part once, then read and edited the second part twice and did the same for the third and fourth parts, then went through the whole book a final time. It's ~80,300 words now. My main method of editing for this novel has been to repeatedly go through it beginning to end. 

My editor thought the word "recovery" should be better defined, and I worked on that by copy-pasting every instance of "recovery" in the novel into another file, reading through it occasionally, and thinking of what to add or change. I previously did this with other threads in the novel too—a meta thread (in which the protagonist is writing the novel), a thread on "the mystery", a thread on microfireflies, a thread on the end of history, a thread on the partnership-dominator fall.

I had two files open whenever I was working on the novel. One was the novel. One was a file with unused material and metadata and other things, like a to-do list for the novel. In the latter file, I organized unused material into topics. I had/have these topics:

Autism

Bickering

Big Bang

Blaming

Blushing

Caldicotting

Cannabis

Change

Coleman

Compulsive-recursive

Consciousness

Cosmos

Cotton Field

Daoism

Degneration

Diet Coke

Doctors

Dreams

Drugs

Drug phase

Earth

Electricity

EMR

EMR—photons/electrons

EMR—schumann resonance

Exercise inventions

Emergent properties

EMF

Emily Martin

Feelings

Fertility

Friends

Glyphosate

Hutchison Effect

Ily

Jesus

Kathleen Harrison

Imagination

Learning

Living

Mercury

Meta

MKULTRA

Microbiome

And so on. Here is an example of what unused material I had in a topic (for Daoism):

-In China, metaphysics was called xuánxué, the dark learning, he knew from Ellen Marie Chen. Its main texts were Zhuangzi, Daodejing, and I Ching or Book of Changes. Chen defined xuánxué, which also translated to “the mystery school” and was close to Daoism, as “the search for what humans consider to be the profoundest values and their efforts to embody these values.”

-on how Dao may have originally been a female deity represented by a circle, which bifurcated into yin and yang

-and Mágū, a Daoist deity associated with cannabis and caves. 

-on the Daodejing’s “emphasis on the feminine,”

-“origin was rooted in the worship of the Mother-goddess”

-Dao was playful, spontaneous

-Translate “dark” line myself—玄 之 又 玄

-玄 was in Daodejing 12 times

-Laozi was an older contemporary of Confucius.

-Daodejing is “a hymm to the power and love of Tao as the Great Mother.”

-Chen called death “merely one stage of Life’s endless transformations”

-that when people see something mysterious, they say very xuán. 

-In Daoism, wrote Chen, “the grotesque and deformed and weak” belonged more to the process of change and so were “closer to the Mother.”

-xuan—"black, dark; mysterious, profound, abstruse, arcane”

-and wrote the Daodejing before going, post-retirement, to live in seclusion

-which was attributed to Laozi (literally “old teacher”), and which Chen felt was more fittingly called “the old wisdom,” 

-of the trinity of birth-death-rebirth