Last year I wrote Finding Sam’s Family, which I changed the name to Finding Sam Healey, to reflect the Finding Yourself series which started with Finding Amy Archer. I thought having the surname worked better than ‘family’. While I’m editing, I refer to my book by the initials, in this case, FSH. FAA was Finding Amy Archer. It’s just something I do.
When I’m editing, I do a quick read through, taking notes on post its before I sit down, with said post its and work through the story, and incorporating any of the changes I thought of. This might be as simple as ‘change the start of the story’ to ‘first person POV (point of view). Once I’ve worked my way through some of the edits, I will bundle up a bunch of them and send them to my critique partners for them to read and make sure that it makes sense, that they like the characters, and the storyline follows logic.
Once I get the critiques back, I work through them and make any changes that may be needed. Sometimes it can be hard to swallow some of what the partner’s say, but sometimes it is crucial to the story, so changes are made. If both say the same thing about the same part of the story, then I know that something needs to be worked on.
Once I’ve edited the next section, I send away to the critique partners and I get it back, and this continues until the story is edited thoroughly. I then put it through a spell / grammar check, and I listen to the story being read back to me. It’s surprising how many words are missing, or wrong words used until you hear it back.
Once that’s all done, I normally book it in with my editor, unless I have already done that. But a novel can take me a couple of months to get through, so even though I’ve started editing, it might not be finished until January, all depending on how I go.
At this stage, I’m looking at booking the editor for February, and hopefully release Finding Sam Healey May next year.
At this stage, I haven’t started writing anything new. I like to have a break, plus still trying to work out if I want to do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November. I’ve done it before, and I’ve done Camp NaNo, which I also won. I like to have a break to allow my creative juices to flow, and they are flowing. I have about five story ideas lurking in the depths of my brain.
Hope you all have a lovely week. Take care out there.