Happy Sunday Everyone! I hope you’re enjoying the weekend.
Today (OK, yesterday) marked the first full week of editing the current WIP: JADE MOON WANING.
For those of you that might be hopping on with this post, you can find Week 1 here.
I have read aloud, editing along the way, 173 pages. The book, overall, weighs in at 587 pages (Double-spaced, single sided) so I’m just over a quarter of the way through.
Most of that was done this weekend. Over the past two days I’ve edited over a hundred pages. Life has kinda caught up to me at the minute, and I’m not able to get as much done, in the morning, during the week, as I used to. I’m not worried about it, sooner or later, things will find balance and we’ll see where we are.
But we’re talking about editing.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m reading the entire work out loud. Any minor change (Misspelling, change a word here, etc.) I mark down on that page. If I’ve got something larger, I’ll flag that area with brackets and a number.
I’ve got an entire notebook lined up to jot down those changes. I’m identifying them by page number and edit number. That means the first edit on Page six would look like this:
Pg 6-1: You need to find a different word here. something like a curse (maybe Shit) only sharper – Project replace.
I’m also doing something new here. At the end of each chapter, I stop and make a few notes down about the previous chapter. These notes have two categories: What Happened? and What’s going on?
For the “What Happened” part, I’ll jot down the important things that happened: “Intro Barty. The hyper-drive shears. Mai’s plan goes to hell(that happens a lot).
For the “What’s going on?” part, I get a little less sketchy. I don’t go crazy, but it’s less sketchy: The Fight at Shade’s Quarry. Mai and Li Kai argue.
What am I going to do with this stuff? When I’m done, I’m going to use it to pay attention to places that might sag a little. I’ll use it to lay down a rudimentary map of each character arc.
Maybe it’ll be useful, we’ll see. I’m kinda making this up as I go. Later on, I’ll snag the working parts for other projects, and ditch the rest.
And you’ll see it all here. Tips, inspirations, I might post snippits, stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor, that kind of stuff.
Stay tuned.
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I’ll see you again for the next Five-Thing Thursday!