Editing and second book release!
So, it’s been a while since I wrote anything on here. I’m sorry about that, I really am. It’s not you, it’s me… I don’t know where I’m going with that bit, so I’ll stop now. I mentioned previously that I needed to crack on with the editing, but I had still failed to understand what a monumental task it would be.
After I completed my first book, I assumed I’d be able to simply read through myself and pick out any mistakes chapter by chapter and it would be fine. That was either hubris or foolishness on my part as quite a few errors slipped through. Its possible proof reading isn’t my forte (I tend to skim), but also when you have written the words, it is harder to spot the errors. If anyone has written anything, they should be aware that they will always have made mistakes, probably a lot more than they imagine.
Rather than leave it alone, I paid for a plugin for Word called ProWritingAid. I need to stress right now, I’m not sponsored by them or anything, it just happened to be relatively cheap with a discount code I found online too. This helped massively, but it was seriously time consuming. It breaks down each chapter (highlighted text; it seemed easier this way) and points out simple punctuation and grammar errors as well as highlighting the over-used words. The over-used words function was where I spent the most time. Figuring out how to remove excess use of ‘was’, ‘had’ and ‘that’ meant reading individual sentences repeatedly, causing me to spot other errors like the typos that still make words.
I re-edited the first novel and replaced the old file, after sitting for 5 or 6 hours staring at a screen, I wasn’t in any mood to continue writing after that, so hence no blog for a while. I’ll be sporadic over the next few weeks too as I need to finish the final part of the trilogy in time for an early August release. This time I’m editing the chapters after I have written them. I never want to do the whole thing in one go again.
That leads me to the fact that the second book is now out! The novel is called Backbones and continues the story began in The Night Out. The links provided are for the UK version of Amazon, but it is available in all regions, so if you want it in the US, just change the .co.uk in the URL to .com and the same product will come up. It is available in both Kindle and Paperback formats depending on your tastes.
Response has been brilliant so far. A lot of helpful and supportive people have come out of the woodwork and helped calm my nerves. A big thanks to all of them.
I’ll probably be back on Friday ranting about cinemas 
