Editing

 Editing 

The more I write, the more I learn about editing and how important it is. This is a story about my editing journey.

With Book Two of The Secrets Cafe trilogy available for purchase and Book One already out, I am editing, polishing, and cleaning up Book Three, "Secrets Cafe, Just Desserts." Round one was going through all the suggested edits and ideas my writer's group gave me. Once I completed that, it was on to round two, grammar, punctuation, and continuity. I was rolling along fine, everything coming together nicely, and then ... chapter three. 

Dun, dun, duh ... The first thing I noticed was that the chapter read flat. The second thing was it was way too long, almost thirty pages! That one was an easy fix. I knew right where to split the chapters. I also knew I could go through the pages, clean it up, trim the unnecessary, and spice up the rest. A lot was happening in the chapter, and it needed to cover four days. But something else was off. I couldn't put my finger on it. I set it aside for the night.

When I woke up, it hit me. The third issue was a timeline. The chapter needed to cover four days, but I didn't mention the dates once. I also should have said how it connected to the previous chapter. I basically had my character going through the motions but not living. Emotions were missing. The love story was missing. The drama and tension were missing! Crimony! What if I hadn't caught this issue and had sent the story out as is! 

This is why editing is a vital and essential part of the writing process. I immediately got to work fixing everything. I split it in two and fixed the issues (hopefully). I ended up adding five hundred more words, but I needed those. I moved on to chapter five (formerly four), which is running smoothly. It's really lovey-dovey, but this is where the characters are at. They are in that stage of puppies and unicorns and cotton candy happiness. Young love.

When I finish this round of edits, I will go back through it again, double-checking, searching for issues, and adding page breaks. When that is done, I will do another round. Edit, edit, edit. 






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