Book at Bedtime

Last night I was editing on the story I’ve been working on for months. I have the first half of the story completed and the second half is a few scenes shy of completion. Since I wanted to start releasing the story next Monday, I decided I should do some editing.

This is more work than I normally get to put into a release. The last few things I’ve written I’ve dumped out to whatever public will have them as soon as the typing is complete. Some of these have been shorter works and not needed any real work to shine them up. Some were written sequentially and I jumped each part out as soon as it was completed rather than finishing the story and tightening it up. All these are interesting ways to get a freshness from the text but it can lead to a lot of scrambling and wrong word choices and unintentional repetition and bad spelling and too many uses of the word ‘and’ in a sentence.

For this, the ‘finish’ story, I wanted it all done (or mostly all done) before I started releasing it. Not only would it let me polish it up like I’m doing but it would prevent a cliffhanger from sitting out there for months until the next part is done, a problem I had with ‘Hell Comes to Irish Fest’. Waiting for a month or more on a story like this can allow the interest to cool too much.

A problem that I have when it comes to editing or even just proofreading is that I read very fast. As a result, I tend to see what I expect to see in a sentence, not what is actually on the page. In order to slow down my pace and see the errors, I read the first half of the story out loud to myself.

This is not the first time I’ve read aloud to myself. Sometimes I do it to see if a sentence flows the way I expect it or if it sounds right coming from a specific character. Sometimes I do it for the entertainment value. I think this is the first time I’ve even done it to this degree and for this reason. It helped. I noticed a lot of simple little typo errors that the spell checker wouldn’t catch for me as they were misspelled to other words. I added some words and I deleted some words. I questioned the flow of the first episode yet again and noted a couple areas I might still need to tinker with. All in all it went well. It also tempted me to do an audio book version of the story but that won’t happen. I do enjoy reading aloud.

I’m looking forward to reading aloud the second half of the story. I wonder when I’ll have time…