Pro Edit Complete!
Last Friday, my fully edited manuscript for From the Grave of the Gods was returned to me covered in red. What’s more, it had been split into four documents and my editor - the wonderful Charlie Wilson of Landmark Editorial - also provided me with a style sheet for reference. I was absolutely thrilled, not only because it had come back two weeks earlier than expected, but that there were so many things for me to go through and fix. I’ll admit, when I took a quick look at all the tracked changes and comments, I was filled with dread. My ego was bruised. After so much of my own work, could there really have been that much still wrong with the book?
Well, yes, quite frankly; that’s to be expected, and I needed to get over myself. We writers are our own worst enemy. We spend months and years crafting our stories, simultaneously convinced that we’re writing a complete trash-fire and the greatest work of art the world will ever know. In truth, it’ll be neither, and no matter where it sits on that sliding scale, it’ll be worthwhile. But the point is that we become blind to our own work and if our work is to have any hope of reaching its potential, it needs more than our own eyes. That’s why we enlist beta readers, bore our partners to tears, and crucially, hire professional editors.
So after I got the ego-bruising out of the way, I set to work going through all the changes and comments… and you know what? It wasn’t actually as bad as it looked. I found out that, despite having researched semicolon use over and over again, I still don’t know where the buggers are meant to go, and that I clearly wrote some sentences while very tired, because they made absolutely no sense, but otherwise the book was in a pretty good state.
It’s taken me all the bank holiday weekend to go through, but as of today, the editing is done with a final word count of 120,327 words. The writing is now much stronger, more sensible and consistent, and it’s time… to take a break. The book is going to need to be proofread, typeset and turned into a proper book that I can hold in my hands. I’m still pretty sure I’ll be releasing it later this year.
For now, however, I’m going to focus on getting my novella, The Re-Emergence, a final editing pass based on what I’ve learned and hopefully get that published on Amazon (ebook and paperback) in the next couple of months. That means that for those of you who have subscribed to my newsletter, you’ll be getting a FREE copy of the ebook fairly soon.
That’s all from me for now.
