Can you rush editing?

When Playscripts bought The Love of Three Oranges, I only had about a week to do the revisions for them to ready it for publication (because I was on vacation for the rest of the time they would have given me) and, though I was terrified I wouldn’t get it done in time, I whipped through it with no problem.

But take Mistress Novel. I finished the first draft on November 30th, 2009 (Thank you, NaNoWriMo) but it wasn’t revised enough to show to beta readers until April 9th 2011 (I only let beta readers read a version of the book as close to final as possible). Beta reads took a bit longer than I expected but I got comments back and revised the book again and again. I had a “final” (ha) draft by June 15th 2011. That boils down to 562 days or 1 year, 6 months, 16 days from first to final draft.

I know I gave my beta readers a longer than is typical amount of time but, overall, that seems too long to me. When I think back on it, I know I spent a lot of time away from the project in that year and a half. Some of it was intentional because I was letting it sit  but the rest was my day job and real life getting in the way. And while I’m very proud of the final project, I feel like I should have been able to finish editing it sooner.

I’m not so much worried about the time I spent working on it, I have no problem spending many MANY hours on a scene to get it just right and I have rewritten some scenes from scratch more times then I care to count. I would never rush the actual revision and rewriting process. But how essential were the hours I spent away from the project? Could I have hustled myself along and got the book edited that much faster? What can I do to make sure that my next book gets to final draft in half that time?

What do you think? Can you rush editing? Or is that something that just has to take its own time?