New year news

Happy new year to you.

I’m reasonably confident that this year will see the publication of at least one and possibly two Viridian System books.

I’ve completed work on my editor’s comments on the Perihelix draft, and followed with amendments to make for better consistency throughout the manuscript.  I woke up yesterday morning with a solution to an issue I’d raised with myself, and that my editor had queried, and rewrote the offending part before midday – which is not bad when you think I have five animals to care for in the mornings, and I had a post-new year’s day lie-in.

I’ve also been reading one of my Christmas presents – a self-editing book that reminded me of things I’ve written down to check, but every time I read these hints it embeds them better in my brain.  Yesterday I worked through the third draft to find all my adverbs (anything ending in -ly) which was an extensive task.  My main aim was to sort out the dialogue tags, but on the way I noticed I use probably, really, definitely and only far too often.  One of the editing book’s chapters is ‘Once is Enough’ and I’ll go through my draft on a quest to eliminate places I say things twice, along with rooting out those adverbs, on my next pass.  Then I’ll read it aloud to my guinea pigs and check how each character is speaking, and how the dialogue flows.  Fairly soon after that, the book should be right.

If that works, then we should be good for a publication date of February 16th.  Exciting!

3 Replies to “New year news”

  1. Huge “likes” for that! What is the editing book? It sounds like something I would like. I have a fairly long list of words and phrases I search for in my near-final drafts, some that are common to everyone and some that are my particular quirks. Feels good to solve a problem, doesn’t it?

    1. Just to let you know this comment went into moderation because your previous comments used another email address. You should be fine with either of them now!

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