I’ve spent the last few weeks getting ready for QWC’s Year of the Novel with Venero Armanno. I’m really excited about doing it even though I had a lot of trouble deciding which novel I want to write while doing the program and have decided to do two.

I’m going to write another book in the world of The Planet Whisperer, called Memory for Loan. I have about 20000 words of this novel written but got stuck when I couldn’t decide if it was going to be second or third in the series. That will influence how I write the characters from No Evil Star—what they’ve done and what they’ve yet to do. This book has significant links to No Evil Star (which is finished and waiting for major edits to be done) but no obvious links to The Planet Whisperer (it’s linked to No Evil Star too). It makes sense to put Memory for Loan second so that No Evil Star, with its links to both books, can tie up all the pieces of the over-arching plot.

I’m also going to write a novella set in an entirely different world. It’s full of wizards and levels of powers. The levels of powers and what skills a wizard had at each level was really fun to work out, but what I’ve written is really disjointed. I haven’t settled on one major character so it’s all over the place.

I’ve also spent some time going through Dragon God—again. I think it’s better now, and ready to be sent to a professional editor. I’ll find one I think I can trust over the next week or so, and also put some feelers out for a cover artist. I know what I want for the cover but I’m not skilled enough to achieve it. Everything I do looks amateurish… time to call a professional.

Once those things are done, I can move forward with publishing. Because this is my first attempt at self-publishing, I haven’t put a deadline on it, so I don’t know what sort of release date I’m looking at. I suspect once I have it edited and with a cover, everything will move very quickly. I still have to decide if I’m going to publish in print format as well. I’d like to—it’s easy enough even if it does take time to organise.

It might be time to find a marketing assistant too!

I’ve enrolled in Queensland Writers’ Centre’s Year of the Novel. I mentioned it to friends and a couple of them said, ‘You already know how to write a novel: you’re published.’ That doesn’t mean I don’t still have a lot to learn.

I’ve been trying to choose what novel I’ll write during the five months of the course. I think I’ll do one I’ve called Memory for Loan. I’ve been sitting on this novel for a long time, primarily because I haven’t nutted out the plot properly. Every time I look at it, I can’t work out how to relate it to other books written in the same world.

The main character is a significant secondary character in another novel I’ve already written (but haven’t edited properly), but this book could go either before or after that one. Every time I look at it, I get a bit closer to something that’s comfortable, but I haven’t reached it yet. Hopefully this course will make it happen.

I’m also hoping to write a novella during the course. I have nearly 25000 words written on a novella I’ve tentatively called Contact but I put it aside because it wasn’t working. I’ve recently done a scene map and worked out what’s wrong: I don’t know whose story it is. There are three major plot lines and three major protagonists. The villain is the same through all the plot lines, but none of the protagonists stand out. I need to decide whose story it is and delete all those scenes that deviate. That could be my side project while I’m working on Memory for Loan. The cut scenes might be another novella in that world.
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As if that isn’t enough to keep me busy for the next six months, I’ve almost finished edits on Dragon God. I want to get it ready for publication and self-publish. I’ve been procrastinating because I’ve never self-published before and it’s a bit daunting. Next steps: polish the blurb, get it professionally edited, get a cover made for it. I’ll get there—eventually. 

​I call this stage The Last Stage but that’s optimistic. It’s the last stage of the process but that doesn’t mean the MS is now perfect. Stage 4 is proofreading.

During this stage I read through the MS from beginning to end, often aloud. Reading aloud lets me become a reader again and helps me avoid reading what I expect to be there, rather than what’s actually there. This includes things like missing commas—or extra commas. I look for all types of errors when I’m reading this stage. Some basic errors I’ve found myself make over and over again:
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• Every sentence must begin with a capital letter and end with a fullstop. This seems basic but sometimes I miss the fullstop, then two sentences get joined together and it doesn’t make sense. Relying on Word to insert the capital letter at the beginning doesn’t always work, especially with dialogue. It needs to be checked.
• Homonyms. In my rush to get the words down, I sometimes write the right word but the wrong spelling (which gives me a completely different word). An example: pair, pear. Both words are spelled correctly so Word won’t pick them up, but only one of the words is the correct meaning. Only careful reading will identify them.
• Repetitions. I’ll often say the same thing in two or three different ways. I think it comes from my background as a teacher where I often repeat instructions in different ways to ensure students understand. It doesn’t work in a story. I have to choose the best option and rewrite or edit the words around it for it all to hang together properly.
• Paragraph breaks. Sometimes I get into the habit of breaking a paragraph when it begins to look too big. Often that works, but sometimes it’s better to begin a new paragraph after a single word, for impact, or to let ‘pretty prose’ stand together in a longer paragraph.
• Repeated words. On any particular day, my mind will somehow decide that one word sounds pretty special and I’ll use that word two or three times in one paragraph or page. One word that often happens with is ‘intense’. I have a list of words I’ve recognised I use a lot (there are a lot of lists other authors have kindly posted online), that I do a basic search for. If they show up too often in a space, I rewrite/edit to make it less repetitive.
• Passive voice. There are certain words that show very clearly that passive voice is being used, eg was, could. I do another search for them and check that the writing in that section is best as passive. If not, I change it so it’s more active.

Sometimes, during the proofreading stage, I’ll notice things in structure or characterisation that don’t feel right for the story. I put a note next to them and go back and check them later. If I allow myself to get distracted from the process, I miss important things.

That’s the four stages of editing I do with my work. Once I’ve done that, the work is ready for critique partners and beta readers. Often my critique partners have seen the story as it’s been developed. I only show them the finished product if I’ve made extensive changes to the structure and/or characterisations. That happened with Warrior Pledge where one plot line was removed completely, and the characters that were the major characters in the first version became secondary characters. That meant point of view changed throughout, scenes were deleted and new scenes were written. It became a completely new (and much better) story.

After this week, the completed edited version of The Gingerbread House will be posted to the Free Stories page on my website. The older versions will be removed from that page, but will still be available in the blog archives.

The third stage of editing a story is looking at characterisation. I leave this part until third because I often make a lot of changes to the characters and their reactions to various things. There’s no point in changing how a character reacts to a specific plot point if I’m going to remove that plot point from the story during a structural edit, so characterisation goes after structure.

This is the section where I have to go back to my character profiles and check that the characters’ GMC (Goal, Motivation, Conflict) is clear throughout and the growth towards the goals is clear. I look at how characters are behaving, the way they speak to each other and what they think while they’re doing it. My focus includes:

• Making sure each character has a unique voice,
• Making sure that voice is consistent throughout, or any changes to the voice are logical and consistent with their personality and the circumstances,
• Adding depth to the interactions between characters to make sure their growth is clear. Every major character must change and grow during the story; I have to make sure that shows in their interactions and introspection.
• Making sure the relationship between the characters develops logically and in accordance with each character’s GMC.

The two right hand columns of my scene map provide the template to analyse character development. Mapping that along with the structure ensures the characters grow and change as the story develops.

As I go through the structural edit, I might think of things I need to check with the characterisation. I write them in the scene map rather than trying to fix everything at once and losing track of what I’m trying to achieve with the structure.

I’ll work through the character notes as they stand at the end of the structural edit, and make the changes noted. Then I’ll map the character profiles, particularly the GMC into the scene map and check the manuscript again. With really short stories, I can do all this in one pass. Often though, this part of the editing will require more than one pass through the document. With a lengthy manuscript, I might need to do a separate editing pass for each focus (eg, one pass for voice, one for personality glitches, one for interactions, one [or more] for individual GMC).

Throughout the entire editing process, I’m also watching for proofreading errors, spelling mistakes, grammatical glitches, homonyms, etc. I correct those as I go through the MS with the aim that the final stage of editing—proofreading—will be fairly quick. Even with all the passes through the MS, I still pick up errors in the last stage, so I make sure never to ignore the proofreading stage.

Authors and editors have a responsibility to present the best possible product to their readers. A good team will locate and fix most errors and be able to present a polished product. It's easy to get words mixed up, particularly homophones. It's one of my pet peeves, possibly because I do it too. Surely though, a professional writer would make sure their work was checked for such things, and surely, their editor/s would know enough to pick them up.

I like reconstructed fairy tales and I've just read an anthology of some. A few of the stories have really annoyed me, though, and I've wondered if I've wasted my money buying the book. The story structures are fine, and the ideas are good. It's the words that have bothered me. Some examples from a couple of stories in the collection--they aren't all homophones.

Then/Than
Then denotes a progression. Something happened THEN something else happened. Than is a comparison. We are better THAN that.
Through/Throw
The text: 'parents try to through a party'. No one in the writing and editing process picked the difference between through and throw?
Know/Now
Text: 'might now no qualms about'. Know fits with knowledge; now is time sensitive.
Where/Were
Text: 'Where they really going into'. This could just be a typing error, but someone should have picked it up before publication.
Moment/Movement
Text: 'took a movement to straighten'. I wouldn't have thought these two words would ever have been confused, but there you go.
Gown/Grown
Text: 'fingers found her grown made of blue velvet'. Okay, this one's a typo, but still.
Clamoured/Clambered
Text: 'clamored from the water'. Not a typing error, but an easy one to check.
Your/You're
I find this one all the time. So many people seem unable to understand the difference between possessives and contractions.
Effects/Affects
One is a result or a noun, the other is the result of an action.

I could go on, but that would be allowing the rant to control me. As a side note: the first seven are from the same story in the anthology. The other stories represented had the same editor.

I haven't mentioned the name of the anthology, the authors or the editors because I don't think that's constructive. What is constructive is making people aware that these sorts of errors occur all the time but should be picked up before publication. Sometimes things are missed, but surely a short story should end up with much fewer than a dozen obvious problems with words and sentence structure (not mentioned in this post).

As a side note. If any of my readers find mixed up words or typing errors in my books, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know. I might not be able to fix it right away, but will certainly endeavour to do so in the next edition.

I've spent some days tearing my hair out, convinced I can't make No Evil Star do what I want it to. Every time I look at the section I'm trying to edit, I get bogged down in all the ways it could change and can't work out where to start. I had decided to give myself a couple of days off, give it a rest, then come back to it with fresh eyes over the weekend. But I still wasn't particularly enthusiastic.

Then I received an email from Dreamspinner Press. They've taken Warrior Pledge! I'm so excited I'm bouncing.

Warrior Pledge is my cat shifter story. It's been rewritten so many times I barely remember where it started. I kept persevering because I loved the story. I just had to find the right mix of plot elements - there are always too many - and the right point of view to write it from. Structure was a big problem with this story too. I wrote it in a three act structure but it needed to be a Hero's Journey.

So now I have two stories I'm working on. Last night I received the pre-production documentation to complete for Warrior Pledge, and I still need to finish No Evil Star and get it to Beta readers.

This weekend, I'll finish the pre-production documents and send them in, and I'll also redo the map of Thalazar I created when I was writing Warrior Pledge. It was created for one of the early incarnations so there are a few changes to be made. I'll draw it on better paper so it looks more professional. I've posted part of it here. The names are now different and it has more information than it really needs, but you can see what the country looks like.

I'll also work on at least one section of the edits for No Evil Star. It's going to be a busy weekend. :)

I'm still editing No Evil Star. I'm down to the last dozen notations that something has to change but I didn't do anything on it today. I know why I've left those last few things to the last.

They're hard.

They're the kinds of things where I need to read back and forth and find exactly the right spot to drop one or two words, then do it again for another few words, then again and again until the picture has built up gradually to give me the impact I want. The constant scrolling up and down and reading, or skimming, makes it really easy for me to lose track of what goes where and what shouldn't be there at all. I just know I'm going to end up with an unreadable mish-mash of rubbish that's worse than the original was.

Or, it could be brilliant.

Meanwhile I'm really enjoying my new Surface tablet computer. I have a nifty stylus that I can write on it with. It's enough fun that I almost enjoy editing. Almost.