Just when you think you are finished ...

You realize that writing on one hour of sleep after three all nighters in a row is a terrible decision when you reread everything and see the horrible typos.

...you realize the poetic prose during the first draft is pseudo-intellectual word salad and does not offer any nutritional value to the ms during the revisions.

You ship the MC with the dead guy and there's no way of fixing that without changing the entire story and that is NOT going to happen just to satisfy your own fangirl whims.

...you've got a major worldbuilding contradiction.

Or rather, several.

In the first chapter.

"Just when you think you are finished ..."
You aren't.

Basically describes my writing life

Just when you think you are finished -
- you get an idea for a completely different story and it won't leave you alone unless you pay it attention so you have to put off the finishing touches of your current wip

(this is my current predicament)

It's never finished until it's published.

And even then...

The important thing is: don't give up.

I thought I was almost done when it hit me I *had* to rewrite 90k. I'm about 40k into fixing that now. It burned like flying naked through the sun, but it was the best thing I could have done.

The first time I had a book accepted, the publisher raved about how much he loved it, but then floored me by saying: "Mind you...it's too long. I'm only publishing 160k works so you'll have to cut it pretty savagely."

I couldn't believe my ears! The ms was 230k! How was I going to cut out 70k words?

In the end we compromised on 192k and if I were to publish the same book today (three further published books later) I would easily get it down to 160k because I am a much better writer / editor now.

Even still, that exercise of cutting 42k out of my precious ms taught me a lot about sticking close to the spine of the story. I deleted the funniest scene (in what is a pretty funny book - despite also being a crime thriller) simply because it had wandered too far from the spine. It took discipline to do that - but made the book more readable and now I understand that readability is just about the most important thing.

No they are all different stories and range in length from 74k up to 192k. I tend to write long-ish though, as the last published book was 150k and I've finished a 136k.

Just when you think you’re finished, you realize something about a scene needs to be changed which involves cutting whole paragraphs and writing new dialogue.