This week I’ve been putting the finishing touches to the basic formatting on Book One. My front and back matter is now drafted. And I’ve had a skim through to check it looks reasonable on the screen. It was a good thing I did because I spotted that I had managed to insert a random character into the footer! Also, a few of my italics had disappeared – I think it happened when I copy and pasted the text into the template. I’ve corrected most of it, but I shall make sure I check that carefully in my physical proof copy. There’s a few more bits I need to sort before I can upload it. This afternoon, I think I shall start working on the blurb again.
I’ve also been working on editing Book Two. I have received a lot of critique on the book, and I’ve been going through and making notes on each chapter. So now I’ve got thirty-five marked up chapters, plus a great big spreadsheet of all the bigger picture issues I need to consider. It feels like I’m doing this giant jigsaw. I can see all the pieces. I know they fit together somehow. But I need to stare at it a bit longer before I can work out exactly how they fit together. The spreadsheet is slowly helping me narrow my thoughts down, because it gives me a brief overview of each chapter, the timeline, and the changes to make. But one of my characters needs some subtle arc changes, and I haven’t quite worked out how to do that yet. So thinking and planning are the next stages of editing. Once I solve my problem, I should be able to work through the edits in a fairly straightforward manner, but I need to know exactly what I’m aiming for first.
Finally, this week, I’ve been planning a game with my Twitter author friends. We’re going to be playing #Pit4Fun next week. Twitter pitches are popular at the moment – this is where you condense your book into 140 characters (one tweet) and enter various pitch competitions to catch the eye of an agent or simply promote your novels. My friends and I are doing one for fun, where we practice Twitter pitches using famous novels. Check out the @Scribotweeters Twitter account for more details!
Jigsaw is a great way to put it. I’ve been going through and changing things with mine. First big editing pass and I’m like, how do I change part A so that when I connect part B it’ll still fit? And if I change this piece to this piece, that piece no longer connects, so what do I do with that?
Yes exactly! I’ve been doing more thinking today, and I suspect I just need to dive in to the full edits and see what happens as I go along.