Ready to edit

Monday:

All our scheduled guests for these school holidays have gone, and today is a public holiday (celebrating the unions winning an 8 hour working day) so we have Tim home. A lovely quiet day. Tim dug up the hard-packed earth in the herb garden for me, so I planted the chives and did a bit of weeding. I am still hesitant in venturing out at the moment as my hay fever is pretty bad. Antihistamines are helping. But I forgot to take one yesterday and really noticed the difference. My nose was too blocked to use my CPAP last night and I didn't get a very restful sleep.

There is still another week of school holidays so I'll need to think of some fun things to do. Then the following week I start editing my book. There are already things I know I need to change/fix but I didn't want to stop my momentum as I was writing so I just made quick notes for myself when I thought of things. So I will attend to those first, then go through and work on the fine detail. A lot of people dread the editing process but I am looking forward to it - it's my day job after all, so I feel like it should be easier than the actual writing.

I've done government work and edited articles for scientific and medical journals, but what I like best is editing novels. And what I like very very best is substantive editing fantasy fiction novels. That is the big picture stuff - world building, characterisation, holes in the plot, why does magic work one way in chapter 3 but completely differently in chapter 12? Cutting out the 37 pages on the life cycle of Quirmian High Elves. Though it can be hard sometimes to convince the author that their readers don't need to know all this groovy world-building they spent four years creating. The trick is weaving the essence of it into the story instead of just dumping it on the readers' heads. Then after that you get down to copyediting, the nitty gritty of word choice, spelling and grammar. Important, but less fun. I am itching to get back to work. I find it very difficult to work with my kids around, so I'm waiting until they're back at school.