Extreme editing

Editing. It's enlightening, necessary, and boring. It's hard work. It's even harder when it's my own work I'm editing, because I know it so well that my eyes want to race ahead. "Come on, I already know this stuff, keep reading!" I read the chapters aloud as I edit, but it's still easy to speed up and miss the errors.

I went into extreme editing mode this week on five chapters--the first two and the last three. I started with the last chapter because it's short, then worked backwards a couple of chapters, then decided to bite the bullet and tackle Chapter 1. You may remember I was having problems with the first page; I'm happy to report that I'm happy with it now. Still, it was a hurdle.

There are fourteen chapters in Just Like Magic, so I'm about a third of the way through. Here are the kinds of things I found to edit:

1) Typos, e.g. "mat" instead of "met." Or an exclamation point where there should have been a question mark. 

2) Word choices, e.g. "further" vs. "farther," "toward" vs. "towards." Both are okay, I just wanted to pick one. Also "Stepmother" vs. "Stepmama" vs. "Step-mama" (as a term of address). I had to pick one. The winners were "further," "toward," and "Stepmama."

3) Punctuation marks. I scanned the quotation marks to make sure they were all facing correctly, and I eliminated a few excess commas.

4) Flow. In a few spots I noticed that the sentence structure was bad, and I fixed it. Nothing big, just moving a few words around.

5) Minor plot points. I lowered one character's age by a couple of years, changed the layout of Ella's kitchen slightly, and loosened a board in the back gate to explain how a large dog could have gotten into a walled back yard. These changes will, I hope, prevent some reader comments of the "That doesn't make any sense!" variety.

I also did more research on creating covers this week, and what I learned is that I need to learn more. And I will! That and more editing, coming up this week.