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.