Zanzibar’s Rings has reached the stage of editing. This process is likely to take some time…
My process
First I read through and made immediate changes to typos, wrong words, and marked where I felt I had a potential continuity error. I also added notes about checking the science (there is some!), and a few other technical issues. If you read my blog regularly you’ll have heard about these, probably in my IWSG posts.
The next stage is to go through line by line and think of how the sentence works, how the scene works, and whether my Point of View is correct. I’m finding that difficult, particularly when I’m in third person POV for Pete, say, then he starts thinking or calculating his way out of a problem. I’m trying to treat it as unvoiced speech, but it looks odd.
I’m also making more notes on bits of plot that seem to contradict each other, or where I’ve started with one intention, then not carried it through. I’ll have to come back and rewrite bits later once I’ve decided what really happens. For now I’m trying to make it reasonably good.
After this run through, I’ll ponder the plot points that need untangling, and do anything I’ve told myself I have to do/decide before I go further. I know the timeline, and whether my current flow of scenes works, are part of that.
Next version
When I think I’ve got it in shape, I’ll write anything that’s missing, and cut things that don’t work (I’ll save them as an older draft and create the next file version).
Then the biggie… going through with a bit of computer help to find all my favourite words that I overuse, and all the trigger and filter words that need to be worked on. There’s quite a long list, but experience helps, and the computer finds every occurrence of them.
Then I’ll do another read through, probably out loud–someone gets the computer to read it for her, which sounds amazing and I might try that instead. That’ll pick up more wrong words, typos, run-on sentences, and things that just don’t sound right.
And after that, it should be ready for my beta readers….
And what I’d really like to do now is work on the cover, as I have to get a banner made for September. Watch for news of why!
Update at 31 August.
Well, I did all that, and decided it wasn’t ready for the beta readers. It was still in the scene-form I’d originally drafted, and putting the time stamps on the scenes showed it jumped around a lot. So I made it sequential. Then I did something else to group the scenes…. and so it goes on.
I might be nearly at the beta stage now–I’m just adding the usual touches I have in the finished book, which seems to be taking an extremely long time as I have more chapters than usual.