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Editing Marooned . . . and Editing in General 2/20/2012 4:20:25 PM
Editing is fun, isn't it?
Hahahahaha!
I am falling asleep on these. Could be I just don't sleep well at night, though.
Anyway, I have finished the first of the edits. Found a few major boo boos. Yup, as tedious as they are, they are soooo important! I'll let the book rest a bit while the cover is being made,and then do another set. Hopefully, I have found them all, but--no guarantees!
I've just spent a lot of hours on this story. Going back over it more than once at this point makes my eyes glaze over. We writers are close to our stories, but too, we want to be done. We want the process to be over so we can publish in whatever fashion we're going to do that. We want to get on with the next one. So mistakes get left uncorrected.
I want to be known as an author who cares about the work she turns in. So, I try to get myself psyched to do the best editing I can do, so it can be a go quicker.
If you can't pay for edits, get a fresh look at your work by letting it rest a while. See the book with new eyes and you'll pick up those mistakes much quicker. Have someone you trust read it, or read it aloud. You'll be surprised what you'll find when you do that. That sentence you thought was gold may be iron! You'll have the chance to change it to something that slides off the tongue more easily. And you'll feel better about your work. A little extra time makes a lot of difference in the quality of your writing.
If you're self publishing, then this is even more important. Badly edited books are the bane of the self publishing world. But not very many take the time to see to it that their work is the best it can be. It's a rush to get it out there as fast as possible.
I remember buying a manual years ago, about writing informational reports for profit. One of the recommendations in it was to make sure you edited your work. The manual was about 20 pages and I don't recall what I paid for it. But--that writer ought to have taken his own advice! It was just full of mistakes of every sort!
You don't want people writing to complain of the mistakes they found. Mistakes take your readers out of the story if it's fiction; they make them decide the author isn't professional whether fiction or non fiction.
If we want to be taken seriously, then we have to take our work seriously as well. Make a difference! Clean up your work! Edit those pages! Go! Go! Go!
