Birth of a Book Part 2: More Editing

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Birth of a Book Part 2: More Editing (mp3)

This is the second in a series of posts about my process of compiling my anthology of my best stories.  If you like, you can jump back to "Birth of a Book Part 1:  Story Selection and Editing."

Of the total 75 stories, the number currently slated for inclusion remains at 26, 10 of which are "complete."  In my last update, I said I had 11 that were complete … not sure how that number went down.  I'm thinking I must've had my doubts about a story and threw it back into the pot to stew a bit longer.

I recently sent off 14 of the stories to my editors – I'm currently working with three fabulous freelance editors – and all but 6 of those stories have been returned to me with edits and notes.  So my queue is full of 8 stories that require either rewriting or revision and 1 story that can't quite seem to pull itself together.

I'm keeping track of all of this with a huge spreadsheet that is either completely out of control or perfectly understandable, depending on which day you check it.  It's been a pretty big job for me to wrap my head around this process, but I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of it.  My spreadsheet originally had a row for each story and information like the date it was "finished" and whether it's been published anywhere.  That spreadsheet included all 75 stories.  I went through the stories one by one and pared them down and then made a separate spreadsheet of stories slated for the anthology.

This smaller spreadsheet includes the same type of information as the first but also has tracking information for the editing process:  editor assigned, status, status of my revisions / rewrites, etc.  When I can interpret my columns correctly, it gives me a pretty quick status of where stories stand and which ones are ready to be submitted to literary journals.  I'm using Duotrope to track my submissions, by the way, which I highly recommend.

If you want more information for how I'm doing the tracking (or anything else), I'm happy to share, but didn't want to bore anybody to death, so just let me know your questions in the comments.

I've created a new project in Scrivener to hold only the completed stories.  It's so cool to actually start to envision what the finished volume might look like.  There still might be some give and take on the stories to be included, though.  My genres are all over the map and one of my next tasks will be to consider how to go about organizing it – possibly grouping stories by genre or some related thread.  Or, if all else fails, alphabetical order

In order to tackle all of this editing and revising on my plate, I'm definitely going to need to heed my own advice that I put in my guest post "How to Change Your Muse's Priorities" over at Wordbitches.

I also haven't yet considered what I want my final wordcount to be for the volume and whether I want to include the serials that I've written and/or how much new material I want to include.  Looks like my goal of getting it all wrapped up this summer might be a bit of a stretch.  But, like the Energizer Bunny, I will not be deterred