Shank's Pony

gday gentle reader

(My last post, "Oh! the pain" was published? or re-published? Friday, I don't know which. When I began this one I found it sitting in the blogosphere in draft. This one has suffered a similar fate. It was drafted late Friday on a long weekend (in South Australia) hence it is only getting edited and published today 3 days later - life gets in the way of my writings - frequently)

I don't care what colour it is, forget the horse I'll walk.  The two most important lessons I learned/learnt (choose your own) from the Voyager submission were

Firstly - the editing method that suits me best is the same as I used to write the damn thing - I need to set a solid achievable deadline and daily/weekly milestones by which I can measure my progress. It's a common business ploy that works for me.

However with this book [book 1 "Break"] the Voyager deadline was too tight. I  was fooling myself that it was ready to publish and all it needed was a tidy up. I was wrong (I often am). During the edit I uncovered highlighted notes throughout the book suggesting  "needs more"  "rework this"  "new scene here" Notes I had forgotten even existed.  

The fact that I did get it done and send it off, is testament to my wife's forbearance. As said in my last post "midnight oil was burnt - rest of life put on hold." 

Secondly - by reading the novel thoroughly (looking for places to tighten it) in a compressed time frame with nothing allowed to distract I got a much better sense of the story as a whole; probably for the first time since writing it.

So two weeks  ago I set a new deadline to finish editing the trilogy on 31st July this year 2013 and divied up the remaining work ( stopped - while I fretted and waited for the voyager result). 

Yesterday I caught up the backlog and went into the black for the first time. Today I stayed there. I'm not fussed by the number per se, I edit to the nearest POV change that keeps it black. 

By  coincidence I am almost half way (49%) through editing book 2 and the whole trilogy at the same time. What continues to alarm me however is the size of each keeps growing. I thought editing meant cutting. (simultaneously I occasionally edit the scenes of book 3 that I want to parse through my writers group - hence a mild increase there)  

The only figure in the seemingly complex tracking sheet I alter at the end of each writing day is   new total   the rest is automatic. The  edited total  for bk2 only gets adjusted when I think about it. On a daily basis it's up and down like a yo-yo.

One day when this trilogy is properly published I will look back and marvel at the Machiavellian machinations I had to use, to convince myself, to get on with it and get it done.

ooroo until my next post
rob