SUMMARY OF EDITS FOR CHAPTER NINETEEN

When my editor read Chapter Nineteen, her pencil homed in on two missing commas, two small typos and struck out three superfluous words.

She also made two valid suggestions. The first involved something which had vanished. My editor suggested that the MC, who’d never been to the place before could suggest to the others that they’d either got lost or come to the wrong place. I wondered why I’d never thought of it myself and quickly inserted a piece of dialogue to that effect.

The second involved the MC suggesting something which she knew wasn’t possible. On this second point I had to stand back and try and look at it from my editor’s viewpoint. When I wrote this I was in my MC’s head. She knew it wasn’t possible and knew why. However, the people she was talking to were not aware of this impossibility because they had not experienced it for themselves. In effect she was holding back information. I can see why this was confusing and got round the problem by getting one of the other characters to make the suggestion. The MC then thought to herself that’s not possible because...

Although there were few corrections needed based on my editor’s observations, there was still plenty of scope for improvement. Most of the things I did were little tweaks and just involved changing the odd word here and there. The main change was to one of the scenes towards the end of the chapter. This was okay as it was and I could have left it as written. However, I had decided to write some additional material in the next chapter and I saw an opportunity to foreshadow this event.