Editing…a necessary evil
I hate editing, but it must be done. Since I’m broke and can’t pay a professional (which I probably wouldn’t do if I had the cash), I do my own editing. Having OCD is helpful in the editing process, but I try to keep it fun. Through several edits, I make big changes and sometimes end up changing what a whole book is about. As I go through the edits, it seems that I would be whittling the work down to perfection, but that is rarely case. It doesn’t matter how many times I read a book and how many other people have said that it’s good, I always have changes that I want to make. I can continue editing one book until the end of time and still not be completely happy with it. As each day passes, the story starts to mean something different and I want to make it come across that way. At some point, which is the point we’ve reached with Second Skin, I pretty much have to make the decision that this is how the story goes and let it be. So, the edit that I’m doing now is just a clean up edit to check spelling, punctuation, and to make sure that I haven’t left any rogue words hanging out (rogue words are the ones that you forget to delete when you’re redoing a sentence).
I’m probably half way through the clean up edit for Second Skin at this point and hope to finish it up this week so I can give it a nice read this weekend and do all of the layout. I have set the release date for Monday, so no more excuses….this editing is getting done.
