Page 98

The end of a holiday weekend and I’m really making some time now. I’m more than halfway through the physical edit - on page 98. I’m beginning to notice some bad habits of mine.

One is leaving too much work to do later. I glossed over a lot of the “setting the scene” sort of work. I didn’t quite know how to do it when I first wrote some of this (well more than a year ago at his point) and it comes off very mechanical. Very boring. So boring that when I come across these passages in the edit my first thought is to put the text down. But I’m trying to soldier through the rough stuff.

I also notice I wrote a lot of this: “a sort of uneasy feeling”, “it almost looked like a kind of darkness”, or “a kind of [some other descriptive word”. I’m not technically compitent with English in that I don’t know the names of the different parts of sentences (thus the examples above). The point is that I toss in these modfiers to adjectives way too often. It’s pretty rough reading at times - for myself at least. I would guess others wouldn’t be so critical - but I would like to put out a book that has the potential to sell.

As state bedofre, I’m into the second half of the book which should mean that the editing goes more quickly. While the book wasn’t written in exact sequential order, much of the latter parts were written towards the end. I had found my voice by then. It flowed much better, so I’m anticipating a quicker run through the second half of this.

I must also say that the physical print edit is much different than previous on screen edits. It’s much easier to flip around and see previous passages and just scan previous paragraphs. Though physically writing new passages is much more time consuming.

Pressing On

As is obvious from the date of the posts, I haven’t been at the editing much lately. I just returned to editing the printed copy a few days ago. I mentioned it previously - personal life issues have come into play. So much that I almost didn’t want to return to it. I had gotten out of the routine of working on it. One of the biggest factors for me returning to it is that I have set my mind that I’m going to finish this.

Though, I’m done setting schedules - I’ve blown everyone I’ve made, so there doesn’t seem to be a point to doing it - it just makes me frustrated.

I still like what I read and like the ideas I come up with on the edits. I can see where you can constantly edit something - making it better and better, changing things around. I think I’ll have one more draft after this and it’s off to the printers. If I play with it too much I’ll just mess it up - and put in too many plot lines. It seems that if this doesn’t make it to a published work it will be from lack of time to devot to it as opposed to the quality of the work. I like it and think it may be something decent.

I may have lost my outside editor. She hasn’t touched her copy since last year? And only made it through the first few pages. At this point I think I’ll print off a clean copy post this last editing round I’m doing. I’ve changed a lot - so it will make much more sense to her AND be closer to the finished product. Though I wonder if she’ll look at that one either? It’s not really her preferred type of reading - plus it is closer to work than pleasure