The Dreaded Edit

Now that you have spent weeks, months, or maybe even years working on your book, it’s time to send it off for editing. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect and was a little nervous, especially because I didn’t have anyone read it as I worked on it. It took over a year to pour everything I had into my book. Now I had to wait for someone to redline it, make it bleed, and tell me if all my hard work was worth it or if I should just burn it.

It took a while of going back and forth with my editor, I am sure plenty of eye rolls from her because I would randomly make edits without telling her, and a lot of late-night hours. I thought that the editing process was going to be easy, but in fact, I think it turned out to be more daunting than the actual writing. The writing, I could just word vomit on the page and go back and change and add to a chapter, but in the editing, I had to really make sure there were connections, depth to the characters, make sure characters were mentioned enough and that they had a background story, or building a scene with sights or sounds if I didn’t do it previously. When I got my proof copy in the mail (that’s me with my proof copy in the photo), I was so excited and I thought okay this is it, I can go live with it now. Then as I read through and checked the cover, I realized shit, a period mark got deleted off the cover, a word was missing in chapter 6, as well as a few other minor things. I wound up taking the whole next day to read the proof from cover to cover. I took the time to mark up what I had previously missed, what my editor missed (which was only a couple of things to her credit), or what was missed on the computer. Sometimes you just need to read a hard copy to see the mistakes rather than reading the draft on the computer, because after a while it all just starts to blend together. The couple of small edits I did find, most people probably would not have picked up on, but I did, so I had to resubmit my draft and wait for it to be refreshed before I could share my news. It wasn’t the end of the world having to wait another day, I was just spitting nails by that point wanting to share my news with everyone. When you hit the dreaded edit give yourself some grace, you just finished writing a book! There are not that many people out there that can say that and it is one hell of an accomplishment. Give yourself a pat on the back and go enjoy a glass of wine as you get one step closer to publishing!

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