One Day I'll See the Wood...

OK folks, it's book update time. You're joking. Not another one? Please insert your inner Brenda from Bristol voice where applicable. 

In the editing chair, not seeing the wood.
(To be fair it WAS a hot day.)

Back on March 2nd, I wrote my definitive guide to the novel editing process. I say definitive guide, but it was mainly a ranty howl about how horrific a time I was having. Feel free to refresh yourself by clicking the link above, or alternatively catch up in my TLDR bullet points below. Basically I decided that the three stages of editing are...

• The first stage - loads of fun, including the first big reread of the initial draft, with all the time in the world to make it better.
• The second stage - the grim, can't-see-the-wood-for-the-trees stage, where no amount of confidence or delusion will convince you this has been nothing but a big fat waste of time.
• The third stage - where it's all polishing and tweaking, ignoring the content and scouring for typos, spacing issues, and punctuation errors. 

At the start of March, I was just embarking on stage Two, and at the time of writing I am firmly entrenched in... Stage Two.

I know! I'm STILL AT STAGE TWO. The humanity! How can I get up every morning when I have that terrible experience waiting for me? Yeah, it's not the most fun part of the process, I can assure you. But it's getting better. Not being stuck in Stage 2 that is, but the actual text. It's getting better. I'm dispensing with waffly sentences every time I pick it up. I'm rewriting whole paragraphs to give a better flow. I'm making sure the character traits I give hints at in the early chapters, develop into fully fledged parts of personalities by the end. It's a long winded process, not least because a pesky little global pandemic rocked up in the middle of it all, and shut my brain down for the best part of six weeks. But it's a process. A long one. And I'm still cracking on and working through it.

A lovely person commented at the end of the March post but every time I try to
 reply, it never comes up on the screen. So, to the mystery poster, 
thank you for reading, and I hope your own editing is going swimmingly.

Sometimes I think I take too long with this stuff. When I poke my head into the indie-writing world now and then, I see other authors manage to crack out new books every few months. I have no idea how they do it. What about their research? Their beta readers? Their thinking time to create new ideas? I don't have a clue. For me, even though this feels long-winded and - at times - really frustrating, I'm still on schedule. I want to get the to the end of the second stage before the end of the year, give out Advanced Reader Copies after Christmas, then get polishing and tweaking, as well as commissioning a cover, in the first part of next year. Then it'll be released sometime in 2021. As that will be my third title since 2017, I feel all right about the hassle of rereading it 53684930 times before that. It's just part of the gig.

All the magic happens here. And all the
grinding, headache-inducing frustration 
 too.

You might be wondering, if you've made it this far, why I'm banging on about editing again. Well, mainly, because it's all I'm doing right now. I have nothing else to say! But when I look at the data for this blog, I can also see that the most read post in recents times, is my definitive guide to editing from March. This could be the case for several reasons. Perhaps people feel sorry for me in my deep distress of Stage Two. (Because drinking lots of tea and sitting in a comfy chair all day is probably just like working down the mines. Poor me? Boo hoo? Yeah, maybe not.) Or perhaps I've struck a cord with other writers out there who are experiencing equally frustrating periods of work. That post got picked up by a couple of other websites and was shared about a bit, and so far no one has told me they fundamentally disagree with it. So that's good. It just proves my point. Stage Two is awful. It's horrible, long-winded, demoralising, positivity-crushing, and needs to hurry up and leave me alone. And on that note, I have some more editing to do. If I want to stop being blinded by trees, that it.

Have a lovely week, folks.