This week has flown by, and I honestly don’t know why. I guess work has kept me busy, and my night job is moving along.

Night job meaning my book. I’m now considering whether or not to open a separate bank account for our publishing imprint, so this officially feels like a job in the best kind of way.

Anyway, this week went well. I have some initial marketing plans laid out pretty well. The timing will depend on when my illustrator finishes the final version of my AWESOMELY AMAZING BOOK COVER!

I’m excited. And you’re damn right I’m leveraging my book cover for marketing purposes. Nothing shady, I promise.

But anyone who signs up for The Evening Satellite, our newsletter, by a date TDB will get a way-early sneak peek of my book’s final cover.

Onto my progress!

I took my editor’s revisions and revised the first two chapters of WoEM.

It took me about three hours to revise 11,600 words. So my work pace is currently around 4,000 words per hour. I haven’t yet encountered staggering, paragraph-rewriting revisions, but I think (hope) those sections will be balanced out with easier ones.

With 204,000 words in my beta draft (a number I want to trim), that’s 51 hours of work. Three hours down, 48 to go.

This weekend will be a wash, because we’re celebrating a birthday with PW’s family, but I think I can manage to hit my estimated goal of completing Manuscript: Charlie by the end of February.

That’s about seven hours of work per week, or one per day. I think I can manage. I feel like I’ve already learned quite a bit about how to handle revisions from a real live editor.

Implementing an Editor’s Revisions

Write Out the Revisions in a New Document

When I sat down to begin revising Manuscript: Beta, I considered for a moment if I should just make the revisions directly on the pages my editor had gone over. She used Track Changes in MS Word to show me her corrections and suggestions and leave comments. Track changes let’s you “accept” a change, implementing it automatically.

But I didn’t want to blindly accept changes, and confuse any new parts I’d written with previous work. Instead, I began Manuscript: Charlie in a new document.

When Editing between Two Documents on a Computer, Use Split-Screen Monitors

I’ve set up a mini office with split-screen monitors so I can have both my editor’s work and Manuscript: Charlie up simultaneously. This would be way more tedious if I had to flip between docs every two seconds.

If It’s Unclear to an Editor, It Will Probably be Unclear to Your Readers

I’ve already encountered a fair number of comments about how a certain sentence doesn’t make sense, feels out of place, or maybe needs more context.

It would be easy to pass over these, assured that I  know what I meant and my readership will too. Don’t be like that.

Whether your editor is actually confused about something, or they’re just pointing out a section that might be confusing for others, the simple fact is, they are readers too. Their comments are there to help make the story as incredible as it can be. I, for one, relish in taking my editor’s advice.

That about does it for my early advice. I’m sure I’ll encounter more things that help move the revision process along.

Writing Goals for 1/19

1. Revise about 20,000 words in WoEM – We’ll see how this larger workload goes
2. Nail down a timeline for my early marketing efforts
3. Continue getting out of bed earlier

Steve D