Sneak Peek and Editing!

Hello There!

So it’s been a hectic month. It's hectic in a good way though. I have working a lot on the book editing this month. I really got a ton of work done in that area. I think I will be finished with that portion very soon. The editing process has pushed me to make some major changes to the story. While doing some editing research I came across an article by Christopher Tolkien, the son of Author J.R.R. Tolkien discussing his father’s editing process. J.R.R. Tolkien’s editing process never actually ended. I find this very relatable and very interesting. He edited most of his work, and later his son Christopher edited much of the work released posthumously.

J.R.R. Tolkien couldn’t afford to pay for an editor or a typesetter for his work so he did most of that himself to save the money. This led him to continue editing the work almost every time a new edition or special edition was released. You can trace many of the changes in Lord of The Rings by reading different editions of the work. As he would expand the overall universe of Middle-Earth and its lore, he would incorporate many of those concepts into later versions of the Lord of the Ring’s ever-evolving manuscript. Early editions of the Lord of The Rings are vastly different than later versions. While the main points of the story never changed, the story as a whole evolved to be richer in lore and backstory. He considered the work living and ever-evolving, but I am guessing there was a huge amount of perfectionism on his part involved.

This whole construct seemed to crazy to me until I started massaging my own story and molding it to be something better than I started with. I almost understand what that feels like when I look over a chapter and see how it fits relative to the previous chapters and chapters to come. It takes me through a process of how do I make this pacing flow better?, or How do I really like how this is being said here? I start to get a sense of the story never really being complete, much like Tolkien discussed. It has also brought a whole new meaning to the idea that a “manuscript is never finished, it is only abandoned by the author.”

So what does all this mean? Well, after a bit of overwhelm, thinking of all the stuff I have to do in order to get this story out into the world, I came to the conclusion that the story has to be finished first. That seems pretty rudimentary on the surface level as I type that out, but I was starting to get the cart before the horse a bit and really dig into the marketing process. Right now the focus is singular. Finish the editing and get the book into the hands of some beta readers. Right now that is all I am focusing on. That helped me to really circle the wagons in January and get a lot of the editing done. I am getting very close on that front.

Where does it go from here? After the editing, I will be sending it to a few trusted beta readers for feedback. Once I get some feedback I will see where that fits and make any adjustments that I feel are necessary.

After the editing is finished I will be setting up a new lead magnet for my marketing plan. I already have that pretty much ready to go. It’s the first bit of the book, a backstory if you will that sets up the lead character. The short story VEHO will be disappearing from my lead magnet and I will be shifting toward the book. VEHO will continue to be available on Amazon.

You all are getting a sneak peek of that new lead magnet. If you want to read it, click on the button below. The graphic was created when I fed the short story into ChatGPT and asked it to create a graphic of the scene of the story. I was pretty impressed with what it returned.

DEAD STATION A MILITARY ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE SPACE OPERA - PREAMBLE