Editing is a Beast

Hey!

I swear I blinked sometime in the beginning of July and then it was August. How the hell did that happen? When I wrote July’s blog entry I had just finished my first draft of the novel. I am still super excited about it.

So much has been going on for the last month.

My big goal was to start learning how to edit now that I had finished the first draft. This endeavor took me down the rabbit hole for over a month now. The prevailing wisdom is when you are going to self-edit, you need to put your work down for a while and come back to it with fresh eyes. I have not touched the draft or even looked at it in over a month now. Instead, I have been focusing on learning how to edit.

It’s been a pretty cool journey.

I started by reading the book Understanding Show, Don't Tell: (And Really Getting It) by Janice Hardy.

Then I went and read the book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print by Rennie Brown and Dave King.

Both are great reads on editing.

I also listened to more podcasts on book editing than I care to divulge. When I go down the rabbit hole on something I usually hit it very hard. I love learning new things.

Then I went on a tear into researching editing tools. Oh My God, was that so much fun digging into! I landed on Autocrit. It’s a pretty cool tool for authors to use for the entire process of writing and editing. The things it shows you when you are analyzing your work are amazing. It can analyze almost every aspect of your work and give you incredible insight. It creates reports and makes suggestions on how to improve your work and measures that progress as you make changes. It also allows you to compare your work to other work in your genre. That was pretty cool.

So, in light of learning how to edit I dusted off VEHO: A BACKSTORY, my trusty old project that has given me so much already, and put it through the wringer. I spent so many hours over the last month digging through the six thousand words in that story it was unreal. As a result, I have created version two of the story and updated it on Amazon Kindle. I have also updated it on my website for download.

You can download it in either EPUB or PDF by going to this link.

What I came out with was a leaner, meaner version of VEHO that I am pretty impressed with. D.J. Molles the author of The Remaining Series and a few other works often says that authors never finish work, they abandon it. After going through the editing rabbit hole I understand that now. You can always improve and update your work. After an entire month of playing with it, I had to finally say this is good for now. It was hard to do.

VEHO in its newer form is cleaner, leaner, a lot less repetitive, and is a much stronger story all around.

I am excited to share it with you.

Now it’s time to pick up the first draft of the novel again and jump back down the rabbit hole! I am a little intimidated by the things I have learned and applying them to such a larger body of work. It took me most of the month to edit a six thousand word story, I have no clue what that will look like for a sixty thousand word story…

Until next month!

Shamon