11. One Step At A Time

The editing process wasn't so much hard as it was time consuming. I had a great editor and I cannot thank him enough. Thank you George!

And man, he delivered on exactly what I was hoping for. Now as a seminary student, I'm used to people tearing my stuff apart. I embrace it when it comes to my writing! And wow he showed me things I was totally blind too. Let's dig into it a little shall we?

He provided me with two big things. The first was a copy edit and the second was a short developmental editorial letter.

A copy edit is a type of edit that focuses on stuff like: grammar, word choice and order, and general flow and consistency of the story. More of the nitty-gritty "hey don't use that here," "be consistent here," and "focus on the dialogue and choices of your writing" kind of thing.

A developmental editorial letter/edit zooms out and focuses on the book as a whole and its story. Does the plot make sense? How can we improve the arcs of each character? What Point of View (POV) are you going to use for your story? How will this book lead into your second book? All those kinds of things.

So for me, George made a lot of the edits for me! He provided a word doc with my manuscript and he went through line by line and fixed all the little things in the story to help it run smoother. So with regards to the copy edit, the book was done!

HOWEVER, it was the developmental edit letter that I needed to work on. Let's start with the small stuff.

First, the "easy" stuff. I needed to completely remove the prologue of the story. Although it was interesting, it unfortunately was too far removed from the main story that it had to go. I still have it and plan to share this in the future as a "deleted scene" so stay tuned for that!

I also needed to polish my writing style a bit. I needed to clarify some sentences, improve my language, and avoid using adverbs as dialogue tags. Instead, I should just say "said" so that it becomes invisible to the reader and they don't even notice it's there.

A lot of clean up of redundancies and style throughout. It needed cleaning elsewhere like: using less exclamation points in my writing; make sure I tied a few loose ends together that I had missed with a few key plot elements; clean up some word usage like shifting from "Blade-master" to a "Blade Swordmaster." A small detail, but people were getting confused at the different classes of Swordmaster; proper usage of italics. All the things!

A lot of these items were super easy to fix and I finished in just a few days. But it was the next large chunks of adjustments that were going to take the most effort to fix.

But I'll save that for next week!