How I’m tackling my Edits

I’ve spent the past few weeks working through Editor’s recommendations on Journal of Sin. It hasn’t really been too much of a chore if I’m honest. I was expecting a thorough professional thrashing, but having now had some time to digest the report, it’s really not so bad. There are some POV shifts that need tidying up, a couple more chapters from the killer’s viewpoint to meet that expectations set by their opening scene and a little more attention given to the wider scene and a couple of side characters.

I decided to tackle it in two major stages – the annotated MS and the full report. I separated each of these into three categories: ‘quick fixes’, ‘a little more work required’ and ‘lock the door and grease the keyboard’ sized issues.

First, I read through the annotated manuscript. Everything that could be attended to then and there promptly was – small typos and omissions (‘of’ is a very small word and easily lost amongst the rush of everything. Repeatedly.), a poorly arranged sentence here or an ill-fitting paragraph better suited to the shredder than the second act were all dealt with in swift order.

After that, I jotted down the midrange and more difficult tasks scene by scene, being sure to highlight where changes in certain places affected other scenes in the book. I set to work on these one by one until they were done. The majority of these were head-hopping POV (one scene in particular could have been lifted from a psychic detective story), some continuity issues and areas of babbled gibberish that needed either clarifying or torching. Most made it in; some did not.

The big issues in the annotations simply referred to the full report where the recommendations were fleshed out and explained. I’m just sitting down to start that now…