Paper Edit 1 Complete

Phew! Have finally finished Paper Edit Number One. I say finished. I've finished making a hideous scribbly mess on the paper manuscript but now have the joyful task of transposing all those squiggles on to the computer version. Fun!

I'm feeling quite good about the changes I've made - at the moment. Probably, like most writers, if you come back to me in about, ooh, say five minutes, I'll be of the opposite opinion and the belief that what I have written and/or changed is terrible and what was I even thinking? But that's all par for the course, isn't it? (Isn't it?!)

I've got to page 56 so far, and obviously still have plenty to go. The thing that did strike me as I've been doing all of these edits is that I've been enjoying going through the novel again, and spending time with my characters. I'm really hoping that may suggest that if I've enjoyed reading it, then there might be other people out there that will feel the same way...fingers crossed!

The plan is to finish transferring all these changes onto the main document and then give it a few days before doing another read through myself. I'll make any changes then that I feel need to be done and then I'll be passing it onto my First Reader (also known as hubby) for an opinion and another pair of eyes for picking up random letters and bits of punctuation that I've left lying around. After that, well, we'll see!

I'm aware that it may seem strange to some that a man is my 'first reader' when it's a romantic novel. Whilst I can understand that, I also think it's good to get a fresh perspective for me. I realise that there are some men who wouldn't be in the slightest bit interested in reading a novel like this and I understand that too, completely! And I have to say, if he was picking out a book to read, it wouldn't be in this genre, and that's fine. But in this case, I've found that it works for me. He'll tell me what he likes and what he doesn't, or what he felt wasn't clear, for example and I trust him to do so. He won't say 'Oh, it's wonderful, darling!' if he thinks it stinks because he knows that I wouldn't want him to do that. Conversely he's not going to nit pick at every tiny thing as I have heard of happening at various writing groups. Personally, I think the two most important things you need in your 'first reader' are trust and honesty. That isn't determined by gender, or genre preference.

In the meantime, I hope everyone else's work is coming along well. Keep on keeping on!

Paper Editing

Yes, I am still editing the current novel. I'm on the paper version now, having already gone through it on  screen. I'm about half way through at the moment and hoping to get a bit more done later on today. It's turning into a fairly big job as there were some scenes that needed to be moved about to stop a bit of 'time travel' and I think it'll flow better in the places that I've put them. That's the plan anyway.

I know a lot of writers really dislike editing but I'm not too worried about it. It's all part of the process to me and at least, when I print it out, even though I still know there's a tonne of work to do yet, I can still see that I've got a novel in front of me. Which is pretty exciting!

And come to think of it, it's just as well I am on the paper edit at the moment as I'm about to be offline for a little while for a computer rebuild. When I replaced my laptop a while ago, following a long and loyal service from my Sony Vaio which needed retiring thanks to the many strange noises it made, not to mention the fact that it was even slower than me at waking up in the morning, I wanted something a bit smaller  and opted for a SSD. On the plus side, this is super whizzy, on the down side it has less storage. So, the time has come to upgrade its innards to give me some more space. We knew this time would come, and I'm still really happy with the machine itself. The slow start up used to drive me mad and the fact there's no moving parts is great when you're clumsy like me and it wouldn't be unheard of for you to trip over the lead...

So, I may be offline for a little while but I shall be back and hopefully I'll be reporting that Paper Draft Number One has been completed! Let's hope!

Good luck to anyone else editing at the moment.