People of Sand

Hey there! I hope you’re all having a fabulous week.

Personally, I think it’s finally hitting me that we’re already over halfway through the month of June (that means my birthday is right around the corner!). I don’t quite know what to do with myself.

This week, we’ve been talking about editing. That being the case, I thought I’d let you in on what it’s like to edit one of my novels.

Anialych: People of Sand

This is the next to be released from the Druid Novels. We haven’t set the release date yet, but I’m guessing it’ll be sometime in March of 2019. Less than a year, then. And I’m only about halfway done with all the edits—but remember, it really takes about six months to get all the editing done, on one of my books.

I started editing Anialych back in February, and finished the first run-through in April. What did I do in that run-through? Well, I edited. ;-)

The first round of edits is basically a thorough cleanup job. I went through the text line by line, checking to make sure everything was in order, fixing any plot holes, making any changes that I thought would make the story flow more smoothly and better fit into the world of the druids, and removing any typographical errors I came across on the way. But this round of edits had absolutely nothing to do with making sure everything was grammatically correct. In fact, that won’t happen for a while.

Round two, which will start up in another month or so, will be all about perfecting the changes I made last time. I’ll be going through the text and expanding on the tweaks I made, ensuring that the bigger changes I made are actually working the way I want them to, and, of course, fixing any of those typos I find along the way.

In the meantime, a friend of mine is reading the manuscript. Actually, a couple friends are reading it. They’re checking my work, for story only. Essentially, they’re beta-reading, fact checking and story marking to make sure I did an okay job on the first round. I’ll use their notes when I make changes in round two—and if I didn’t have these people, there would’ve been holes I missed in both Cedwig and Dwr.

Round three is the one I like to call “let’s go fix all the typos,” and I usually do it at the same time that we begin laying out the manuscript for print. In this phase, I’ll have another editor (Kristina or Tammy) checking my work, making changes, while proofers go in behind them and make sure we didn’t miss anything grammatically, and I come in behind them, making sure everything remains the way I like it. That’s where we’ll do the finalization, the checks that clean up the manuscript and make it completely readable. It's also a bit chaotic, because it can be too many cooks in the kitchen, by that point.

And after that? Well, the proofers and I will go over it a final time, I’ll make any changes I want and approve the proof, and it’ll go to print.

Thankfully, I don’t have to mess with any of that for a little while yet.

*whew*

And that, my friends, is the life of a manuscript on its way to print. 

[love]

{Rani Divine}