I’m leading an Editing Path for my writing group for the month of February, and the weather decided to cooperate. There’s something about editing, shoveling snow, editing, shoveling snow in a cycle that makes for a good start to accomplishing twenty-eight hours of editing.
So far I’ve done two hours of focused editing, and two turns at shoveling. It helps to have a partner who would rather shovel than edit, but is doing both.
It’s also nice that our kick-off was yesterday, before the snow started, so we had the opportunity to talk about what we wanted to accomplish, and share tips in how to gets things done.
This last week, I read through the whole novel on the kindle–noting any major changes that I need. I have one boring chapter that needs major work, but the plot flowed fine and I like the ending. Nice to reconfirm that, and to realize what I need to beef up early to make it flow better. Also, I know which characters seem weak and need the most work, and which ones I liked the way they are and shouldn’t mess with too much.
I’m starting on chapter eight–that’s where I left off in the revision about a year ago, although I’ll bounce back and improve the beginning chapters since I’m posting them on critiquecircle.com. I’m also doing some general editing of overused words and then I’ll put the novel back into scrivener and work on chapter length while revising. I may need to move a few scenes around, if I don’t cut enough since some of the chapters are a bit long.
I enjoy editing, but I’m not so sure I enjoy keeping track of the time spent editing. I prefer to just do it as much as I can on a given day.
As part of Editing Month with my writing group, I’ve been keeping explicit track of my editing—doing three or four hours most days. I tried counting down an hour at a time, but it works better to use a stopwatch app on the phone. Although an actual stopwatch might be better so I didn’t keep looking at my phone which interrupts my editing.
I tried using an hour-long playlist. That didn’t work since the playlist wraps around. I didn’t realize it until I got to the end of the chapter, by which point the hour playlist was half over again. I was so absorbed in my chapter, I don’t think I’d have noticed if the music had stopped playing either. The idea isn’t to stop after an hour, just to be accurate in recording my time.
While it’s annoying to track, it is helping me be more focused in my editing. That’s a worthwhile skill to reinforce. It’s easy throughout the year to ‘step aside’ to check Facebook, email, or other things on the computer. Having a stopwatch counting the time stops me from doing that.
I’m looking forward to next month when I don’t have to use the stopwatch and can just edit. But when I’m in the zone, I forget about tracking the time anyway.
As February winds to its slow, cold end, I’m glad that Editing Month is almost over. Not because I’m done editing French Immersion. The only time I don’t edit is during NaNoWriMo in November. Even then, it’s usually only the first two weeks where I try not to edit, and I correct stuff I’ve written the day before. It’s the way I write. I try to get the scene down as much as I can, and like to go back and fix things that day or the next day.
What I did differently during Editing Month was I focused on one book. Usually I’m doing a little with one book and a lot with another, bouncing between the two to keep motivated. This month I didn’t have that, and while I missed it a little, it was easier to keep my characters and location clear in my head if I stayed with one novel.
I revised my 85,000 word novel over two times. As in I went through it following my process of going through each scene twice. I did that going through the novel once, then I did it again. I also wrote three new scenes and polished them extra times. I also went through my ‘bad word’ list and removed most of them. I’m still working on tough words like: was, have, had.
During February, I had a chapter of the novel come up on critiquecircle.com each week, so I also dealt with people’s feedback, making corrections to the chapters, and seeing where the comments applied to the whole book such as when one critiquer expressed confusion about what my main character was working on. I had it as software architecture, but it turns out that doesn’t make sense to non-computer developers, so I changed it to wireless platform. It was a very good change, and one that was hard for me to see since an ‘Architecture Team’ makes sense to me from a work perspective. Another critiquer hadn’t read the first book in the series, so her feedback has been extremely valuable to making this novel a stand-alone book.
My plan is to continue to work on this book, mainly through critiquecircle.com. The first book in the series French Impression is the topic for my book discussion group in April. I’m hoping from that and critiquecircle.com to get extra ideas for book three in the series which I’ll draft in November. I’m not sure if I’m going to wrap up the series with the third book. I know the overall arc for my main characters, but I’m having a lot of fun writing about two incredible women who don’t get along for a lot of reasons, not just because Miriam accidentally slept with her boss’s husband on her first night in Paris. Although that didn’t help things.