DIY Editing

I don’t have a LOT(just one) of experience with finishing novels, but so far, at the very start of a that length of story, I write a passle of sentences, delete most and end the writing session with a sentence(or 10, if I'm lucky) I think is usable. Next day, I edit yesterday and build on my redaction. This “editing” involves improved word choices, syntax adjustments, tense changes, the addition of new material as well as fearless deletions. Stuff like that. Working through that first chapter, every subsequent day, I re-read/edit what I have done before. And see, even though my bad planning and disorganization leads me sometimes to deleting a lot of finely-edited but irrelevant material, I depend on being sucked right back into the magic place and time of the story. If my heavily-redacted material sucks me back in, I know I am touching on quality. After I frame-up the novel thusly, I begin re-reading the M/S from the top, editing ridiculously more as I go. The story comes into focus - to life, and takes on color and I even assign names. If I can get through 5 chapters doing all this micro-editing the whole way(and these chapters might actually just be scattered events in what is to become "the story,")and I am still excited about what I started, I keep going. Very plodding, yet chaotic in that I never know where I am going, much less the ending; I just let the story happen. But edits. Egad. Only saving thing I can say about edits is that they become fewer and fewer and at some point I have “some confidence" I have a coherent M/S and then I stop eating so many Rolaids and start fishing around for people who will take the time to give me feed-back🤪