Get your filthy hands off my desert

Lots of the indie writer blogs and pages go on, at some length, about the need for an editor. Get an editor, get an editor, GET AN EDITOR!!

OK. But there are two sorts of editing. The first is the grammar police, the deep blue detail freak who makes sure that the apostrophes are appropriate, the commas in the right place, the spelling correct.
I hold up my hand and admit that Echo is full of typos. At some point I'll go back and republish a less embarrassing version. I'm hopeful that there are far fewer in Outcast.

Ian Rankin was on the radio a couple of weeks ago. He mentioned that, after submitting his latest book to the publisher, an editor came back and asked for changes. One of them involved a character being completely erased. He says that the editor makes his book better.

That might be true. It's well known that the original cut of Star Wars was a complete disaster at the screenings and it took some serious editing to make it the version that we know and love (or, at least I do). A film is always a team effort but a book is, usually, solo work. I would argue that, once an editor makes major changes, it stops being the author's work.

Would Echo and Outcast have been better books if I had got an editor (type 2). Possibly. Those of you that have read previous posts will know that I'm not creating the best book that I can. I'm writing the book I want to read. If you like my stuff, that's really great, but it's not about you, it's about me.

Would I sell more copies if it was a "better" book? Who cares? The income from Echo covered the costs of the cover art and paid for a couple of nice meals out for us both. I'm hopeful that Outcast will do the same.

It's just as well that I enjoy the day job.

Thunderbirds are nearly go

Having announced on Facebook that I was going to publish Outcast on the 26th, I have to make that happen. I've got the annotated manuscripts back from all three of my First Readers and I've nearly finished working through all the mistakes and some of the changes.

I say Some of the changes. FR2 thought the opening battle scene was too long and technical, but FR3 liked it. FR1 had some fantastic ideas for the plot - she's seriously twisted - but I couldn't think how to get them in without a complete rewrite. Many of them will be appearing in Echo 3' though.

I've been very lucky to have three people who will give their time to read through my stuff and come up with three very different views. FR2 is well widely read in all sorts of genres and can see what doesn't work. FR1 sees lots of things that could be done differently and often better. And FR3 reads for pleasure and can suspend belief and ignore the clunks if she's enjoying it.

Some of these views clash and, ultimately, I'm writing to please myself. I'm thrilled if other people like what I've written and even more thrilled if I recoup my costs (the inner Yorkshireman is never that far away). I wasn't too sure about the first twelve chapters of Outcast (over a third of the entire book) but the feedback has been positive, so I've got away with it.

Two weeks to go before I foist it on the people who are kind enough to be waiting for it. The fourth edit (bits I don't like) is underway and should be finished in the next couple of days. I'm then going to work through some of the dialogue and try and separate out some of the voices (several of them sound too much like me). Then I have to try and remember how to format and upload to Kindle. It's been a long time since I did that for Echo.

Later this week I will be trying out some of the sales pitch for the Amazon page. If you're around, I'd love your feedback. Hope to see you then.

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.