Contact version 2.0
If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed that I have doing some edits…
On day 3 of edits. #Somuchred And Yellow, Purple and blue. #amwriting
— Rich Jones (@IM_RichJones) February 10, 2016
Day 4 of Edits. The red is abating. Am able to sleep, but still the dreams come! #amwriting
— Rich Jones (@IM_RichJones) February 11, 2016
Day 5 of Edits. I think I am done. WooHoo! Wait…OMG…What have I done!? WHATHAVEIDONE!!? #amwriting
— Rich Jones (@IM_RichJones) February 12, 2016
Day 7 of edits. What is a Semi Colon? No seriously WTF is it!? WHATISIT? *Whimpers into glass of whiskey*
— Rich Jones (@IM_RichJones) February 15, 2016
Well I survived and I am pleased to announce that a newly edited version of “Contact, The Mason Chronicles Part I” is now available on Amazon and Smashwords!
So far I have been doing most of my writing without a good editor who doesn’t have the same name as I do. Editor’s cost money and so far I have been hedging on investing too much in this little hobby of mine.
I still don’t have an editor, but I found a nice option that I think helped me tune up the prose. I used the Hemingway Editor app in this revision. It’s a simple tool and it basically scans your text and flags various things for your consideration. Think of it like Spelling and Grammar check in Word, but where it focuses on things that make it hard to read. So it color codes sentences that may be Hard or Very Hard to read and it gives you counts on usage of Adverbs and Passive Voice. It also points out any place that there is a Simpler Alternative to what you wrote. By no means is it a replacement for a true editor, but I found it helped me zero in on sections of my writing that were not user friendly. A lot of my writing came up as Hard to read. Mostly it was because of complex sentences with lots of “and” usage that merged a few ideas together which in turn made the prose less concise and a lot less tight and readable. Kind of like that last sentence. See what I did there?
So I pushed the edited versions out and now new readers will hopefully find Contact much more enjoyable and easy to read. Also if you want to see the difference, I would suggest re-reading the first chapter. That had a lot of edits. Makes sense because it was the first one I wrote and I was trying to introduce a lot of complex ideas. As I made my way through the edits I clearly improved and found a lot less edits were required. So reading Chapter 1 – Tank, should you give you a good idea of the improvements.
No I don’t expect anyone to re read the book, this was more for new readers.
So there it is, I am working on Connect now and will let you all know how that goes.
