David Weller Author Blogspot

This was the final chapter and drew just one comment from my editor. That was about how the MC reacted to one particular discovery she made after the climax to the story. My editor was quite right and I made changes to this to show the MC behaving in a more believable manner. Just with other parts of the MS which didn’t draw much comment from my editor, I found myself making changes. Although this chapter is still recognisable when compared to the original draft, it has been fleshed out to include some more interesting detail. It includes one small scene not found in the MS my editor read and this helps to set up the story line for the sequel. Is this the end of the story about my editing endeavours? Hell no, we’re not even halfway there yet.

This was another chapter which didn’t draw very much lead from my editor’s pencil. There was one instance of a missing comma and one small typo to be corrected. However, in the rewrite, I cut the whole of this chapter and pasted it into my trusty reservoir of discarded text. A small portion of it found its way back into the MS in a rewritten form. The main reasons I decided to cut this whole chapter in its entirety included: ·          It did nothing to further the plot. ·          Much of it had become redundant because of changes to the story-line. ·          The MC was being reactive instead of proactive. ·          There wasn’t enough tension to grip the reader as it led up to the climax of the story. All I can say about the current version is that it makes the first look weak.

My editor made very few pencil marks on the pages of this chapter. There was one instance of a missing comma to indicate a possessive, one instance of incorrect capitalisation, one missing word and one small typo. All of these were easy fixes and I should have spotted them before I sent the MS away. However, one thing I’ve learnt about self editing is that tired eyes don’t work as well as ones which have been closed for eight hours. Still, it seemed that there wasn’t much I needed to do to this chapter. Two minutes work and it would be perfect. Wrong! This one involved a lot of rewriting. I kept the first four pages but added a lot more detail. Then I cut the remainder of the chapter and pasted into a file I keep for this purpose. I would use this material in a revised format later on. I then set about writing some brand new material which would introduce an additional character to the story. This character and the events surrounding them would enable me to show the reader t...

A few weeks ago, I was asked if I could add another 20,000  to my current word count. Whilst this sounded daunting at the time it hasn’t been as much as a struggle as I imagined it might be. To help me on my way, I was advised to try and even out my chapter lengths to 3000 words plus. This advice was given based on the length of my first chapter which was about 3200. Each of the four parts of a novel should ideally be of equal length. To help me to achieve this I have always kept a chart where I record the number of words and MS pages in each chapter. When I looked at what I had already achieved, I was able to see where I should focus my efforts to add the extra words. As I was now looking for a revised total word count of 75000, I set a target of 18750 for each part and set to work. By the time I had read and edited my material, I’d added another 12000 words to the count. A glance at the new totals showed me where I still needed to focus my attention to keep the balan...