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@ericawordsmith Well it took me 5 years on and off for 45,000 when I was eight, so you have that going for you. 200,000 words…dang.

What I would do in such a situation, with such a large manuscript, is to take everything I know about the book, and separate it into categories: worldbuilding, characters and characterization, theme, and plot. If you have 200k words I would assume you have plenty of all of them. Then I would basically fix anything that doesn’t fit together in the four categories and make sure everything works together harmoniously, practically rewriting the outline if you plan on changing history and world rules, and then I would rewrite the work. I would also take scenes I definitely want to keep and put them in a separate doc for later, along with anything else I want to keep. I would, with such a long document, try to keep as much of the original as possible to save work. But depending on how much you intend on changing, it may be quite a torturous process…I am all too familiar with rewriting whole novels. But I’ve never dealt with anything near that long, so my method may or may not work here. I find K.M. Weiland’s method of outlining extremely helpful to avoid rewrites in the future:

How to Outline Your Novel

I hope I helped somehow (and congrats again on 200k words…wow)!