The Beginning – volume 7 in the series Behind The Smile
Lek – The Beginning
I just made progress on Lek – The Beginning! So far I’m 21% complete on the Editing phase. 1 Days remain until the deadline.
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Place your pre-order for delivery on December 26th at a discount of 45%
Here are my editing tips for Indie writers, because editing is a most important and time-consuming task for writers, especially those who do everything themselves, which is the vast majority of Indie authors, since most authors derive more pleasure than money from their efforts. It requires the editor/writer’s close attention to the document’s every detail, its format, and all of its elements; a thorough knowledge of spelling, grammar, punctuation, terminology, sentence structure, clarity, conciseness, tone and voice, inconsistencies, and typographical errors.
A good editor has a wide knowledge of writing skills and general knowledge or and an attention to factual details, which might mean validating an author’s claims in a story through research.
It is difficult for most writers to edit/proofread their own work and mostly for two reasons. Firstly, they are close to their work, and secondly, they are biased in their own favour. There are also two distinct processes involved in the editing process: mechanical editing and substantive editing.
Mechanical editing involves a close reading, with an eye on consistency of capitalisation, spelling, and hyphenation and other end-of-line word breaks; agreement between verbs and subjects; scores of other matters of syntax; punctuation; beginning and ending quotation marks and parentheses; number of ellipsis points; numbers given either as figures or as words; and hundreds of other, similar details of grammatical, editorial, and typographic style.
In addition to regularising those details of style, the copy editor is expected to catch infelicities of expression that mar an author’s prose and impede communication. Such matters include, but are by no means limited to, dangling participles, misplaced modifiers, mixed metaphors, unclear antecedents, unintentional redundancies, faulty attempts at parallel construction, mistaken junction, overuse of an author’s pet word or phrase, unintentional repetition of words, race or gender or geographic bias, and hyphenating in the predicate, unless, of course, the hyphenated term is an entry in the dictionary and therefore permanently hyphenated in every grammatical case.
The second, non-mechanical, process—called substantive editing—involves rewriting, reorganising, or suggesting more-effective ways to present material. All this while not over-tampering with unusual figures of speech or idiomatic usage that is pertinent to a piece of work. All authors have their own voice, and this needs to be preserved and encouraged.
Two editing tips that will help the Indie author/self-editor are:
1] Leave the work for at least two weeks and do something else. Write short stories, plan your next book, or write articles for your blog. This will distance you from your work and give you a better chance of making a good job of editing it.
2] Upload your book onto an e-reader and have that read your book back to you, while you follow the text on your computer correcting errors as you go. Hearing misspelled words and typos will make them more noticeable than reading them to yourself.
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I just completed the Editing phase of Megan’s Christmas! Now onto Proofing!
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The concrete boys were back today and surprised me yet again. Instead of just laying storm-water drainage, they are resurfacing the road (lane) to a depth of five or six inches with reinforced concrete. Now that’s what I call progress since no more than five residents own cars.
It just goes to support the idea that Thailand has borrowed a shed-load of money (from China?) and is trying to spend its way out of an (impending?) recession. I don’t know, like I said the other day, but it seems that way to me.
Still progress is progress, and it may ease flooding in our lane for decades (the concrete certainly won’t be worn away any time soon).
I am also making progress with my books. I have edited and re-edited that new book, which i eventually called ‘Andropov’s Cuckoo’, I am happy with that now, so I have started to submit another, a book I wrote in 2014, called ‘The Disallowed’. It was meant to be a gruesome vampire horror story, but I didn’t have it in me and it came out humorous.
I started reading and re-editing that yesterday, because I couldn’t get out, and made sufficient progress to be able to submit it to a couple of agents looking for comedy today (agents generally only want to see the first three chapters to decide if they might be interested in the book).
So, that’s more progress. It takes them four to twelve weeks to say yea or nay, and I will have it re-edited by Wednesday, then on with the next. I’ll do them all before I start anything new – probably. I do so prefer writing to what necessarily has to follow it, if you are an indie publisher.
However, I already have seven stand-alone books or series, with thirty books in the series, so any progress selling them could make a huge difference to my circumstances.
This early afternoon, my friend Dave came calling. I think that that is the earliest by three or four hours he’s ever come around. Anyway, the reason was that a mutual friend, Murray is leaving the country in two days and he thought that my email from yesterday inviting him to join us for a farewell drink was about today.
No problem, a lot of good came from our meeting, and Davy learned to check the date that emails are sent.
This is easily done, but it is still often overlooked.
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While on the subject of emails, you can tell where a legitimate email was sent from by highlighting it (in Outlook), right-clicking it, selecting Options or Properties and reading the metadata. The sending address will be a string of numbers, which you can copy into dnsstuff.com and it will tell (resolve it for) you.
An automated version of this is how advertisers know where you are.
I say it only works with legitimate email, because professional spammers usually falsify this data to cover their tracks.
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I finished editing Dead Centre II yesterday morning, so I got straight on with the cover. I have only had the covers of the Behind The Smile series designed for me, the other thirty–odd book covers I did myself.
I like to complete my editing, then the cover and finally the blurb for the back cover. I like to do it that way, but it is probably better to get a few different covers out earlier, so that readers can express their opinions.
The way I do it doesn’t leave a lot of time for that, because I am always wanting to get on with the next novel.
Perhaps I’ll see if it works better next time.
Update: I sold a copy within hours of it being published without using pre-ordering, so I’m happy about that.
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I am already being asked for the next 112,000 words in the BTS series! I published 225,000 in the last quarter of 2014. It’s getting to become hard, but enjoyable work. Like working in a soap opera, I should imagine. Perhaps I should have made the novels half as long, because all five are 112k+ making almost 600,000 words so far.
For comparison, a thirty-minute soap would run to about 8,000 words or less!
As many of you know, I finished writing Dead Centre II at the end of last month, but it was also the first book that I had written solely on a tablet – a Kindle Fire HDX, as it happens. I had never tried editing a novel on a tablet, so my next task was to try that.
Editing a novel on a tablet has been a disaster!
I will explain. The Kindle Fire HDX has sixteen gigabytes or memory, so plenty you would think, and so indeed it is, if you only write a couple of thousand words a day and then upload them to the main computer to be tagged on the end of your novel. It works very well.
The size of the Kindle (in the photo), compared with my Asus, is tiny, yet it has ten hours of battery life compared with the Asus’ two and a half. It makes it the ideal medium to use when I’m out for the day but still working. That was why I thought I’d try editing a novel on a tablet as well.
However, although it can easily read books much larger than the 75,000 words in DC2, it is not equipped to hold them in memory for editing. While it can cope with editing an article or a chapter with ease, editing a novel on a tablet like the Fire is awesomely tedious.
The first problem with editing a novel on a tablet is that the internal gubbins of the tiny machine is so overwhelmed that it sometimes can’t find the time to load the keyboard. If you can persuade it to do that, and there are a few tricks you can play on it, it takes seconds, between one and sixty, usually, but it can be more, to carry out each command.
So, say in your typing frenzy, you allowed the predictive selection of ‘standardised’ for ‘stand-up’, you would need to backspace four times and type ‘-up’ (ie,three characters). That is seven operations, which could easily take five to ten minutes.
Now, I like the app, called My Office, I think (a large ‘W’ on a red square), but I’m afraid it can’t cope with editing a novel on a tablet. Writing, yes, but editing, no. When writing, I achieved speeds of 600 words an hour, which is comparable with my speed on a laptop, although I can write faster by hand, but hate typing up.
Dog Root in a Tree Stump
Dog root in a tree stump
Those of you who couldn’t see the root outside my office window which has transformed itself into the head of a dog overnight, here it is, clearly marked. You will probably need to enlarge the image to see it easily, but she is there looking up to two o’ clock.
My experiment with editing a novel on a tablet has put me back a few days, because I did stick with it for fourteen of the twenty chapters, but it means that I have to crack on now.
