Editing Mode

I finished revisions based on beta feedback last week. I’ve been busy volunteering for VBS at my church every day, so I’m glad I got it done before that started. I’ve moved into the next step – editing.

I have a lovely friend that I met through my social anxiety exploration that is a proofreader and copyeditor. Early this year I let her know that I was working on this book and planned to use her services. I tried to keep her in the loop of what step I was in the whole time and when it looked like it was going to take much longer to get those beta revisions complete, she suggested that I send her chapters as I finished them so that she could work on it in the evenings.

Each Friday I would send her the chapters that were complete. This allowed her to work on proofreading while I was continuing to work on revisions. Which means I already had her first set of edits in hand when I finished the last chapter. No down time to sit and wonder what my next step should be!

I started going through her edits this week and I have to say that it’s much easier to do than the beta notes. Even though most pages are “bleeding” with her suggestions, they don’t hurt my feelings in the least. It took me a moment to realize why.

When my beta readers gave me their feedback, it was as if their opinions regarding the content were opinions about me. It felt like I was being told I did things “wrong”, and I had no idea how to make them “right.”

With these edits, it’s all about grammar and punctuation. I don’t feel like these changes are in any way reflective of me as a writer. I simply go in and make the changes and move on. Just because I used capitalization where I shouldn’t, or forgot a million commas, doesn’t mean that my story-my baby-is bad.

I think it also helps that she experiences social anxiety as well. When she adds a little note saying she can relate, it makes me feel good to know I’m giving someone the feeling of being seen. I still have anxiety about what she’ll think about the book as a whole, but the fact that there is anything that she connects to feels “right.”

Now that my children have their licenses, I can see my time to work opening up a lot. Next week they’ll be at church camp, which means that I can be at the office all day Tuesday-Thursday. I’m hoping that will mean I can zip through these edits and move to the next steps of formatting, cover design, and uploading everything to get ready for publication.

I gotta say, though, that one thing I didn’t take into consideration when I started writing this book is how very time-consuming going through a 140,000-word story over and over can be. Part of me says I need to make sure future books are shorter, but I didn’t realize this one would end up this long, so I’m not sure how to guarantee that. Considering it’s two stories in one, I guess you could say I wrote two 70,000-word books. Which sounds a lot more reasonable.