I’ve been held captive in a foreign land. Editland, it’s called. It’s a paper kingdom, ruled by Pencil the Red. Blog access is severely restricted, Facebook is but a shadow, and there’s barely a peep from Twitter. Too long a stay there could take the shine off the apple of your eye.
Today, I thought I’d share some things that came to light while editing my novel. They may or may not apply to your work.
Character slip: I have three main characters, two are poetic and one is streetwise. As I read, one poetic description of the houses along the shore jumped out at me. Why? The scene is supposed to be in the POV of my streetwise character and she would never use such a description.
Overused words: I‘m doing well in culling superfluous “that”s, and in an earlier post, I noted that I’m aware I use far too many “buts.” However, I was shocked to find I’ve used the word “stood” a ghastly number of times in my manuscript. Crutch words are not always the usual suspects.
Yadda, yadda, yadda: A few places, I summarized, when I should have detailed. One particular scene described a party. I elaborated a bit, but I was anxious to get to aftermath of this party … the chocolate scene. I think the aftermath now has more impact, for two reasons: the reader will sympathize more with Jalal and the reader will get another indication of Meredith’s tendency to avoid confronting the unpleasant.
I’m continuing to fine tune, so if you have tips for things to watch for, share them in the comments section.
Next step: working on that dreaded query letter!
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Linda Cassidy Lewis 
There’s so much to remember to do when editing. I had a training session on proofreading at work and one thing that stuck with me that I never do is; read backwards to catch spelling mistakes.
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Thanks, Patti. That’s one I’ve never heard. I’ll have to try it.
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