Day 89 – How I Go Through Edits

I’m exhausted today, but I wanted to give a quick overview of my editing process. As I’ve talked about in earlier posts, I only do two drafts of my books. The first draft, I do my best to bang out the story, without worrying too much about repetition or sentence structure. I’m cognizant of it while writing, but it isn’t a focus.

While I’m working on that first go round, I keep a Word doc with any fixes or errors that I need to correct during the second draft.

That second go through is where I pump up description, fix errors I’ve caught, and worry about repeating words or sentences. I fix a ton of stuff during this draft. What I don’t do, is change the story much. What I come up with the during the first draft is pretty much what I stick with.

After I finish that, The Tall One reads the book. I fix all the crap she finds.

Then it goes to Cynthia, my editor. She finds 800 bajillion typos, missing words, and extraneous phrasings. That’s the actual number of mistakes she finds. It usually takes me a few days to get through everything.

I send her a Word document of my manuscript. She turns on the Track Changes function, finds my errors, and sends it back. Using Word, I can accept or reject the changes. It’s a slick option in the program that makes this kind of thing very easy. Time consuming, but easy.

That’s what I’m working on now. Tomorrow, I should make some serious progress, if not finish going through her notes.

Then it’s back to banging away on the sixth book in the series. I want it to release not long after Decayed, which is two or three weeks away.

See ya tomorrow.

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