Category Archives: Editing

Impatience and writing don’t mix!

Posted in Editing, My Books, Writing by

I’ve been more aware of my impatience writing this last novel. Losing three months due to illness, made me feel rushed to get back on schedule. It didn’t matter that the schedule was self-imposed. I’d hoped to streamline my concept-to-publishing timeline this time. But haste makes waste—or typos, at least.

powEventually, after much writing, editing, and reading, reading, reading, I pronounced An Illusion of Trust as ready, done, finished. I sent out ARCs. Christa Polkinhorn and I exchanged ARCs. When she pointed out a few typos in Illusion, I decided to reread it one more time.

POW! WHAP! Ewwww …

I found a few more typos and many sentences that needed tweaking. Cassie Hart, another ARC reader, pointed me to the typos she’d noticed—a couple of which neither I nor Christa had caught. My concern wasn’t that the typos existed because I suspect my remaining ARC readers will catch another lurker or two, but what bothered me was where those typos occurred.

Not a single one of the edits we found were in a sentence as originally written. I edit as I write, so much of my first draft remains unchanged by subsequent edits. I created every one of those typos during later editing. In fact, I made most of them in the final-polish stage.

So as I correct these typos and tweak these sentences, I’m conscious to slow down, read each word and punctuation mark, so I don’t introduce another problem. For my next novel, when I think it’s at ARC stage, I’ll wait a week and then read it through ONE MORE TIME. Even then, with familiarity clouding the editing brain, I won’t catch every Pow and Whap, but I might avoid the Ewwww.

I hope you do too.

elle

Oh my, how you’ve grown!

Posted in Editing, My Books, Writing by

That post title refers to the length of my novel An Illusion of Trust. My target goal of 80,000 words may seem conservative to some of you, but at the time I set it, I’d struggled to get the first 60,000 down. But after I got feedback from my alpha reader, the words started flowing. With additional input from beta readers the book grew more. The manuscript that’s with my copy editor now stands at almost 92,000 words, which is 4,000 more than its prequel, The Brevity of Roses.

paperwhiteSpeaking of editing, I’ve mentioned before that one of the ways I edit is by reading my manuscript on my Kindle. But because I had the old-style button keyboard model I didn’t actually do mark-up on the Kindle. Not so this time around. One of the Christmas presents my family gave me this year was a Kindle Paperwhite, which has a touchscreen that makes highlighting and notation much easier.

I hope I’m not the only writer who gets a little sick of reading their book by the time it’s ready to publish. I struggle with impatience, and it doesn’t help that the question of what I’ll write next starts nagging me long before I finish with the work at hand. Yes, I get distracted by that next shiny thing. In this case, it’s two shiny things, so I’ll have to decide which should come first.

Anyway, I apologize for being so terrible at estimating the time I need to finish something. I thought I’d have An Illusion of Trust polished before Christmas, and then I thought surely by the end of January. Now we’re almost a week into February and it still doesn’t have that final gleaming coat. But it’s close—oh, so close.

May I suggest you subscribe to my newsletter so you’ll get first look at the cover and learn about special promotions and giveaways?

elle

Might as well face it, I’m addicted to …

Posted in Editing, Punctuation, Writing by

Commas! There. I said it. I’m a comma addict. I love them. They’re beautiful little things that add pause and sense and order to sentences—if you know how to use them correctly. Apparently, my lack of education is appalling.

commaYou’re probably aware of this quote:

“I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.” — Oscar Wilde

Well, it wasn’t quite that bad, but after a few hours of inserting, deleting, and sometimes re-inserting commas on one recent editing day, I decided to get smart and refresh my knowledge of comma usage rules. I say refresh because I thought I’d learned all the rules at one point. Not so.

What I discovered is that I use commas where they seem appropriate to me, but sometimes often I do so in ignorance. It’s not entirely my fault. I was taught the bogus rules of always using a comma before but and never using one before because. But other rules I’ve been breaking, I imagine some teacher tried to pound into my thick skull at one time.

I’m in luck. Recently, one of my sons bought me a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style, so I am currently experimenting to see if an old dog can learn new comma tricks. I started with nearly 5,100 commas in my 91,000+ word manuscript. I’m re-evaluating each one. That’s not quite as tedious as it sounds. So far, this exercise has resulted in many improved sentences in ways other than comma use. Even my readers who don’t care a whit about commas will appreciate that.

Here’s a link to the excellent punctuation section of the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL).

elle

What if it’s the key to everything?

Posted in Dream, Editing, My Books, Writing by

Like all writers, I jot down my brilliant thoughts when and wherever they come to me. Okay … I jot down my not-so-brilliant thoughts too. I’ve written these thoughts, of whatever degree, on scraps of paper, napkins, page margins, magazine subscriptions cards, even a mirror. I’ve yet to buy one of those nifty waterproof notepads for the shower, but I do keep a notepad in the drawer of my bedside table.

note

Unless this is your first visit to this blog, you probably know I’m in the final stages of editing my next novel, An Illusion of Trust. The task has become so intense that I also edit—symbolically or literally—in my dreams almost every night. It’s not restful, but I think my nocturnal editing has produced a good idea or two subconsciously. It’s also produced one bit of maddening frustration.

Remember that notepad beside my bed? Well, I woke from one of those editing dreams the other night and got up to use the bathroom. Fully awake, I thought about what I’d been dreaming and when I got back to my bed, in the dark, I pulled out that note pad and wrote a note to myself.

See the photo in this post? You can read “description” in the second line, right? Any clue what the first line says? Well, since I’m a little bit familiar with my chicken scratching, I think the second word is “thing”. But I’ve looked at the first word for three days now and I still can’t figure it out. And even if I read the note it as “blah-blah thing description”, I can’t imagine what I meant. Then again, maybe the two lines are separate notes. Aaarrgh!

So, I’m haunted. Obviously, I thought this was important at the time I wrote it. What if it’s the key to a brilliant edit? What if that edit would pull every element in the book together? What if the future of my writing depends on this notation? I’m not sure I can move past this.

How will I prevent the recurrence of such a horror? Any future middle of the night notations will be made in the notes app on my iPhone!

BTW: If you decipher that first word, let me know and I’ll send you a signed copy of Illusion after it’s published.

elle

Imminent book demise averted!

Posted in Editing, Fiction, My Books, Novel, Revision, Writing by

You may have noticed, it’s been over a week since I last wrote a real post—and if you didn’t notice, please don’t tell me. I’d like to keep the illusion that you’re all hanging on my every word. Anyway, I’ve been busy editing and revising An Illusion of Trust.  The editing was no problem. Then along came revisions.

Actually, part of those went well too. I added two short scenes and made minor revisions to another. But the biggie stumped me. So I took a break and read—a whole book. I still couldn’t think how to revise. So I looked at a few thousand stock images for the cover. Still nothing.  So I printed out my scene synopsis and marked the four problematic ones because seeing something in print often wakes my Muse.

This time she only opened one eye and mumbled a few words. So I did the logical thing. I decided not to revise those scenes. I’m just kidding, of course. I decided to toss the whole book.

Over-reaction? Maybe, but I was frustrated. However … I took one last stab at the four scenes. I decide there were good reasons not to change one of them, but I made notes on ways to subtly revise the other three. I knew that wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t fix the problem my alpha reader cited. So I started an email to tell her I wasn’t a good enough writer to salvage the book. But then I decided, before I gave up, I’d show her the only changes I came up with. And …

She said, “You need to take ‘I’m ready to just walk away from this book’ out of your vocabulary forever.” She also said the revisions I’d suggested were “perfect”. So … yeah. I’ve made those revisions and now I’m doing another read-through before I send it off to beta readers.

Want to hear something funny? Over-reaction was the issue she wanted me to fix. Now can you imagine me having a character do that? ;-)

Step, step, step … the novel progresses

Posted in Editing, Feedback, Fiction, My Books, Novel, Writing by

I need to make a list of the steps left to get my next novel ready to go. Otherwise, I’ll run helter-skelter and accomplish nothing. Writing the first draft was, of course, the first step. Editing and revision will be the next several steps. I think—hope—I learned a bit writing the first novel, so there won’t be as much work to do this time.

I have my previous task list here somewhere. On my hard drive. Somewhere. I have a gazillion files for The Brevity of Roses. I’m great at creating files, but lazy sorting them logically into folders. So, yeah. That task list is here … somewhere.

During the past ten days, I finished the second and then the third draft of my new novel [Insert Title] and sent it to my alpha reader. Now, I wait to see how much revision she advises. I’m hoping she sends me the perfect title along with her feedback. Or maybe I already have one. I keep adding possible titles to my list. None have really taken my breath away, but my husband has already cast his vote. Though I suspect that’s just because he knows how indecisive I am, and he’s trying to move me along.

One editing tool I’m using this time is my Kindle. Three times during editing of my first novel, my husband printed the manuscript at work, but now he’s retired, so instead of printing I upload it to my Kindle. I read a chapter at a time, with my manuscript loaded in Word, and edit directly. I do miss marking up the actual pages, but the “distance” created by reading on the Kindle makes poor syntax, typos, punctuation and other errors jump out just as printouts did.

Last night, I started reading my manuscript straight through on my Kindle. I didn’t even make it past the first paragraph before I reached for paper and pen. I don’t know why I never heard it before, but when I read that paragraph last night, the duh-duh-duh-duh-duh rhythm of the first four sentences made me cringe. So I noted the need to mix up the sentence beats to add some music to that opening.

“So much time and so little to do. Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it.”

Have a wonderful week. Maybe I’ll even find time to comment on some of your blogs … don’t faint.