Category Archives: On Writing

My editing process

Opening and closing question marks
Opening and closing question marks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Still have the cold but it’s getting better. I wanted to talk a bit about the process I use for editing. I’m still working on tweaking it some.

Writing – my  favorite part.
Edit 1 – when I write the first draft, I write as fast as I can. If I don’t know a specific detail – I’ll put a couple of question marks in the document and move on. The first pass I do figures out what the question marks are.
Edit 2 – working on tweaking and tuning. Removing any obvious misspellings. If there are any parts that are difficult to read, I work on tweaking those.
Edit 3 – Done by my editor. This stage mostly looks at the overall work. She gives me a list of things I may need to add to (or take away from). Content Editing
Edit 4 – I work on changing things based on my editors input.
Edit 5 – the Line Edits – again by the editor.
Edit 6 – tweaks done
Edit 7 – Final Proofing by my editor.
Edit 8 – tweaks done and final pass.
Format / Cover / Testing and loading.

I’m still working out how to best do everything.  The good thing is with each edits the red marks on my pages get less and less, until the final proofing which usually only has a few minor changes.

Saturday Night Fun

Topographic map of Egypt. Created with GMT fro...
Topographic map of Egypt. Created with GMT from SRTM data. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Been a busy week around here. Hope you’re doing well. I did an experiment. I put my first book on Amazon and didn’t do anything to promote it. Guess what, I didn’t sell a single copy. So now this week we’ll work on promoting it a bit and we’ll see how we do.

I’m working hard on book 5, I’ll call it Egypt. I’m having a lot of fun with this book. Yesterday I wrote the ending bit, why you may ask did I write the ending bit, because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and so I put it down. So if you get stuck or keep thinking about a certain portion of your novel, do not hesitate to write it down.

Still lot’s of chaos but we’re working on it. You may see a few different versions of the site over the next several days, I’m trying to find a template I love, and haven’t done that yet.

Here’s the words we’ve done this past week.

Weds – 3617
Thurs – 3505
Friday – 3544Saturday – 3517

Book Publishing – Last Minute Checklist

Use Recommendations
Use Recommendations (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So the first book is up on Amazon. One of the things you want to do as an author is work on getting accepted into Amazon’s Affiliate Program. I’m waiting on that before I put up the book links here. Approval takes 24 hours. Any money I make from that I’ll be reinvesting it with my readers. Hopefully we’ll be able to give some gift certificates away before Christmas.

The last week has been a flurry of activity. Here’s what you want to make sure you have ready when you submit your book.
1. Title
2. Categories
3. Keywords
4. Cover
5. Description
6. Price
7. To KDP or no KDP

Since I have some free time now, before I start editing my 3rd book. We’ll have a post every day talking about each of those points.

We’re making some good progress on Book 4. Here’s what we’ve written over the past few days.

Weds. – 3759
Thursday – 3554
Friday – 3634
Saturday – 3619
Sunday – 3561
Monday – 3658
Tuesday – 3508

Editing- not my favorite part of writing

"Quarters of the news editor", one a...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Hope your week is going well. Been a busy time around here.

 

Book 1 – has finished the second round of edits. I’m now working on it, getting ready to send it back to the editor for the final round. I’m starting to get a bit excited. I know I had mentioned it may be published in May, don’t think that is going to happen.

 

Book 2 – I finished my first round of edits – now it goes to the editor.

 

Book 4 – almost done. I’m at the climax / ending. It’s according to how much the characters play around at the end. They’ve already side tracked me a couple of times, so maybe done this week or not.  Right now it’s at 83k words. The goal I think is 90k. We’ll see how much I get to close to it or not. The good thing about having that many words is you can always remove stuff you don’t like.

 

Editing –

 

I need to come up with a better process. I’m not sure how I’m going to do it. I realize it’s an important part of getting the work out there but I do wish it could be sped up a bit. The goal of course is to have one of my books coming out every month. If it takes more than a month to edit each one, then it’s not going to happen. I need to streamline some things or something. I need to ponder on it some.

 

I think I have the getting the words down pretty good. Most of the time I can get 3500+ words in a couple of hours, unless I have a whole lot of distractions. Sometimes I’ve been able to do it in an hour and half, sometimes it will take me three hours. I’m also figuring out when my most productive writing time is.

 

Here’s the word counts from last time we talked.

Thursday –

Friday – 3553
Saturday- 3550
Sunday- 3562
Monday- 3601
Tuesday-3544

First Edit done – and some punctuation tips..

English: A stack of copy paper.
English: A stack of copy paper. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hope you’re doing well. It’s been a busy time around here, but busy is good. I got my first edit back from book 1 on Friday. I went over the reviews and sent them back. I have two more edits to go. The goal is to get it published this month… hopefully that will work out. I did find out some pretty cool editing notes, I’ll share with you below. I’ve also been hard at work on book 4. I’m about 60,000 words in it. That should be done this month. I also finished the first bit of editing on book 2. Are you confused yet. Here’s what I do.

Write the book – when I write, I go full tilt. If I don’t know something I just highlight it and put a whole bunch of ?? in the text. I read it and clear up the ?? this is my first run through. I then run through it again and correct grammar mistakes, and make sure the hero doesn’t have a burr cut on page one, and long blond locks at the end. I then send it to the editor. She checks it mostly for errors in the framework of the story, and let’s me know if I missed anything that I should have put there. She sends it back to me, I make edits and then it goes back for the final line edits.

Some people after they write, they then only work on editing. I don’t do that. I’m not sure exactly why I don’t maybe I’m afraid my story will go away. So while I’m doing any of the above I will make sure I write my 3500 words a day (at least). I want to write a novel every month, and I’ve told you before I want to write a million words this year. A lofty goal I know, but if you break it down into x number of words a day, it’s not so bad.

It’s not like it’s a chore either, I really love to write, I can usually write the 3500 words in a couple of hours.  Speaking of words and to keep me honest, here are the word counts since we talked last.

Friday – 3566
Saturday – 3607
Sunday – 3531
Monday – 3577
Tuesday – 3628
Weds – 3548

Here were some edit notes I got from my editor – hopefully you can use these tips as well.

Ok, capital letters regarding Mom/Dad etc.

If it is a proper noun, it needs capital letters. If it’s not, it doesn’t. The best way I saw someone explain when to use them and when to not is to substitute the name (Mom/Dad) for a Christian name, eg. Mel/Don

Eg. ‘He had spent the night with his Don’  – this doesn’t make sense, so it shouldn’t be capital letters.

‘He had spent the night with Don’ does make sense so this would be a capital for Grandpa.

So there you have it, a real easy way to tell when to capitalize Dad and Mom.

Scene Checklist for New Writers – Over twenty tips for selling your WIP

The Checklist of Fantastic Literature
The Checklist of Fantastic Literature (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hope your week is going well. Can’t really believe we are already to Weds. It’s been a crazy week around here, working, helping my daughter get ready for Semester tests. I really think I could have passed her History exam with flying colors. I know I should have been putting some good stuff here, but hopefully I will make up for it today, with two awesome bits of information. Note I also use this page as my personal bookmark tool.

First a scene checklist, these are things you’ll want to make sure are in every scene you write. I know you’ve read a book before and were like, lets skip all of this boring stuff. This will help people to actually read your book. Good stuff.

http://writerswrite.co.za/scene-checklist

I’m not sure if I’ve talked about Writer’s Cafe. I will tell you it is a treasure trove of goodness. Not only can you learn from people who are actually selling books, but you can also ask questions, and I really love when someone tells you how well they’re doing. A great post (I think it was from yesterday) about a ton of things you can do in order to sell more books. Here’s the link.

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,150526.0.html

Hope you have a wonderful day. Below are the writing numbers from the past few days.

Saturday – 3600

Sunday 3567

Monday – 3550

Tuesday – 3677

Weds – 3673

Tips for the Ending

Q Tips
Q Tips (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hope your day has went well. It’s been a fast one here and super busy.

We had a new goal today – 3500 words and we hit it. 3730. I actually could have kept on writing, was definitely on a roll in a good part of the story. This story is going to have three threads in it as well. I’ve found that writing a thread at a time, till a distant point, then writing the next thread and so forth has worked pretty well for me.

One of the tips from the book I suggested yesterday was to do a brief outline of what you wanted to write for the day. I’m not an outliner, but doing that has definitely helped me to boost my productivity a bit.

I also saw this post about Endings – which I thought was spot on – you can check it out here – http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/knowing-when-to-stop-expectations-for-a-satisfying-ending

Enjoy your evening.

Starting Book 3

227: Book Writing Class
227: Book Writing Class (Photo credit: TheBracey)

I started book #3 today. I actually hate starting a new book, it is good that I’m familiar with most of the characters. I got 3125 words written today. I’m not much of a plotter – maybe I should be. I just start typing and go with the flow. I enjoy writing. I don’t think I could not write now. Do you do that? Do you dream about your characters? Maybe I’m just a little bit weird.

I mentioned to you earlier that I got a good book about writing. See that’s another thing, I want to learn all I can about my writing, so my stories will be the best they can be. I know I can write, I just can’t write well… yet. I read somewhere that it takes a million words before you get the hang of it. We’ll see if that is true or not, I think I should make it a goal to do a million words before the end of the year.

Takes out a sheet of paper.

So we have 259 days till the end of the year.
So far I’ve written 90,000 words.
That leaves 910,000 / 259 = 3514.
And so a new goal has been made. The good thing is, the longer I write the faster I write, hopefully that all remains true.

Sorry for the sidetrack bit there – so the book I’m in the process of reading is 2k to 10k – the process of writing more. Again I’ve just started it. I’ll give you an outline of it and how / if it helped my writing as well. You can find the book here – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009NKXAWS/

Our thoughts and prayers go out to those in Boston.

 

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Ever have one of those Aha moments

Walk to Work Day
Walk to Work Day (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Heh, I know it’s getting late. Almost 9pm here, but figured I would post something since I’m still working. I have my own business I run, we do things like SEO, wordpress, social media – things like that. I had a problem I was trying to figure out all day. I went on a walk with my daughter and wife, it has been beautiful here the past couple of days. On the walk we talked about stuff, on the way back to my house, I figured out my problem.

So why do I tell you this? If you’re having a problem with your story, or if you’ve boxed yourself into a corner with your plot. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Take a step back and don’t think about it for a bit. Do something fun and exciting. Your mind works in mysterious ways and it will come to you.

I also got a killer book yesterday, which I’ll share with you more about it tomorrow. I finished up a the ending for one part of my second story, I don’t really like to call them parts, so I’ll call them threads. The second thread should be finished tomorrow, then the third thread should be finished by next week. Then I’ll probably finish editing one and two and send them off to the “professional editor”. I’m still trying to figure out if I want to continue writing, or if I want to stop while I’m editing. I guess I’ll decide that when I get to it.

Words written – 3022. Enjoy your night.

To twist or not to twist

Plot twists
Plot twists (Photo credit: sgs_1019)

Wrote 3,150 words today. Another good day. A reminder, one of the reasons I write a word count here everyday is to keep myself accountable. If I get distracted or bummed, I just remind myself that I have to tell you guys how many words I wrote today.

So we’re starting to wrap up the second story. There are two threads within it. I was writing both of them for awhile, and then I decided to focus on one, when I get that one done, I’ll work on the other one. So the first thread is almost done. I’m trying to think if I want to kill a character off – and use that for a bit of another plot twist, OR not kill him off. I think I’m leaning more to the killing him off. I should have completed that bit by tomorrow and then I’ll share what happened.

Still haven’t gotten any feedback from the beta readers yet. But we’ll see.

I think probably what we’ll do is finish up on book 2 – then work on editing them really hard. I think I’ll probably continue writing the next one, already know what it’s going to be about. The goal is of course to publish one a month, from now thru December – starting in May. I think if I work hard enough I will be able to do it, after all I’m a firm believer in the fact that you can do whatever you want to do, if you work hard enough.

Now back to “work” for me, hope you enjoy your evening.