Monday 20 February 2012

Editing with Stelios

I'd wanted to publish before i went on holiday, but i was still working on the final draft. I took a copy with me but was too busy (!) catching rays and making vitamin D to look at it. However, there's no in-flight movie with Easyjet so i had four hours on my hands coming back. It was really useful to be able to shut out the world and focus.
I got through the entire second half of the book. I've read and changed and re-read and changed again the first half, but there were big chunks of the second half that i'd forgotten about. i not only sorted out a load of grammatical errors and double spaces i also found a couple of mistakes.
That's the problem with taking so long to write a story, and the fact that it covers 179 pages. You forget what you said in the first part and unless you're constantly flicking backwards and forwards it's easy to introduce continuity errors. Hopefully i've found them all, but i'll get E to read it through and check.
Whilst i was at it i also discovered an error that didn't exist. At the start of the book there are eight soldiers but, towards the end there were only six. I knew where one of them had gone but, as far as i could tell, i'd accidently lost somebody along the way. I scribbled notes and slotted in the missing character in several places, then got to a point nine chapters earlier and found out that they'd purposefully been written out.

DOH!

Almost ready to publish. I'm getting slightly nervous.

1 comment:

  1. Pete, you may be interested that my mate John has recently published his book on Kindle. Have a look at his blog here http://diggerjohn.blogspot.com/2012/02/long-and-winding-road.html I am sure you will have some common experiences. Bill

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