As you might be aware, I’m currently hard at work, either editing Broken Melody or procrastinating from editing Broken Melody.
My editing process usually involves three rounds of going through the book myself before handing it over to beta readers.
Each time I read the draft I change the font and font size of the book. If the text looks different every time, you tend to catch different mistakes on each read-through. This time around I even went as far as to betray everything I stand for as a web and graphic designer and did one round of editing in Comic Sans.
–Shudder–
No one can say I haven’t suffered for this book.
But I also change the way I edit every time.
The first round is basically just a read-through where I replace all the placeholders and go through my editing notes on what to fix. It’s the round that takes the draft from a complete trainwreck that only I understand, to something actually resembling a book.
The second round (where I’m currently at) is where I read the entire book out loud to catch weird phrasing. This would be very simple, if I didn’t live with a tiny, judgmental owl that insists on giving his input. My reading today has sounded like this:
“Orrell tackled her to the gound as the explosion went off — shut up — shielding her with his body as the ceiling — shut up — above the door blew to pieces and — jesus christ, Artemis, mind your own business!”
My window is open, so I’m fairly certain my neighbors think I’m insane.
The third and last round before throwing the damn book at the beta readers is simply running it through grammar software like Grammarly and ProWritingAid, and have a computer tell me how crappy my writing is. But unlike with Artemis, these judgmental bastards at least give me suggestions on how to fix it.
That’s a general overview of my editing process.
And, of course, it’s important to remember to procrastinate by stopping in the middle of editing to write a blog post about editing!
