THE EDITING GETS HARDER

When I began the editing process I had little trouble finding things that required improvement. Four major rewrites, and hundreds of editing hours, later I was beginning to struggle.

After I received a request for the full manuscript, in December, I put it aside for three months. Over the past couple of weeks I've read it again and found things which my tired eyes missed on previous passes. Although minor in nature it's still irritating that I missed such glaring errors. Most were to do with punctuation and I found a missing full stop in one chapter, an unnecessary question mark in another and a few commas which I really had to think about. I also found a few phrases in the narrative which needed tweaking.

Having been through the whole manuscript, and rectified these things, I'm left wondering what else I've missed. I'm also left wondering how many more times I'll need to go through it again.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HOW I LANDED MY LITERARY AGENT

Being represented by a literary agent is what authors, who wish to be traditionally published, aspire to. It's the only way their work will ever be seen by a major publishing house editor.  This is not always an easy thing to achieve and statistics say that the odds of receiving an offer of representation are about 6000 to 1. This is how I received my offer of representation. On the 18th of March 2021,  I sent a query letter and a 10 page writing sample to Cindy Bullard at Birch Literary. 39 days later, on the 26th of April I received a request for the full manuscript. Not wishing to blow my chances, I spent 10 days editing the manuscript and sent if off on the 6th of May. The next day I received an email saying that Cindy would be in touch within 8 weeks. On the the 1st of July I received an email saying that Cindy was behind on her reading and asking if the manuscript was still available. I said it was, and the next day Cindy emailed and thanked me for my patience as she con...
Read more

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

When I completed my MS I was in no doubt that I had a good story with an interesting premise. However I knew something was lacking and was so close to my own work I couldn't see what it was.Over the past few days I have read the editorial report in conjunction with the annotated MS my editor returned to me. I can see that I missed quite a few opportunities for some really tense drama. Now the blinkers are off and I am raring to go again.
Read more