Victorian SF Adventure

The final editing of my slightly steampunk, Victorian SF adventure story The Journey Within is now complete and both myself and the editors of the Ancient New anthology are happy. Now just awaiting a publication date...

Slow Editing Progress

I've finished work on editing one short story this week and, I think, my screenplay. Editing is such slow work compared to writing.

Summer Doldrums

Things seem to go quiet on the writing front every summer. Not many responses to submissions, I guess because the readers are on holiday. I've not done much writing either, mainly because I'm editing at the moment. I can't say I've done much of that either. I have 2 short stories and a screenplay to work through. Once my beta readers are done with Gap Years I'll be working on that too.

Must get on with at least one of them...

A Whole Lot of Editing to do

In the past couple of weeks I finished the second edit of Gap Years, the first drafts of a new screenplay and a new 4000 word short story and the supporting proposal to go with the screenplay. Now, I’m faced with lots of editing, reviewing and critiquing, both of my own work and of short stories I’m critiquing for others. After a first edit of the screenplay and story they will go off to be critiqued, then come back for further editing. Gap Years is now with a Reader, after which I shall work on The Final Edit.

Somewhere among all this, which will keep me busy for several weeks, a new short story is beginning to take shape and hoping to make it onto paper…

Second Edit Complete

I've finished the second edit of Gap Years, in which various critiquers point out spelling, grammar and other problems. Most of the 9 parts of the novel have been looked at by a selection of different people, and I've taken the comments I thought useful and made changes accordingly.

The next stage is a complete read-through by my First Reader. Okay, technically he's not the first, but he'll be the first to read the complete novel.

Interview with Me!

My second stop on the Codex blog tour is at the site of Gray Rinehart. Author, retired air force officer and contributing editor for Baen Books, Gray has interviewed me about editing The Immersion Book of Steampunk.

Second Edit

I've sent the last two sections of Roadmaker off to my Orbiter writing groups to be critiqued. Both of these have already been edited by me so it'll be interesting to see what else they find. The last sections didn't get too many comments on the text itself, but mostly general comments on parts of the plot and the characters. I've actioned many of the comments that were straight-forward to fix, but some will need a bit more work - the excessive number of POV characters for example. I guess 26 is too many!

How Do I Edit My Story?

I don’t know about you, but I find it far harder to edit my own story than to write it in the first place. The problem is, I’m happy with the way I’ve written it, and when you read your own work you’re blind to mistakes. Lots of people have written lots of useful advice on editing and critiquing. I don’t claim to be very good at it, but I thought I’d share my experiences.

Hopefully, if you’ve used a decent word processor, any obvious spelling mistakes will be picked up, so you shouldn’t need to worry about that. The problem is when you’ve made up names of people or planets, or created new words to describe some amazing piece of technology. The spellchecker highlights them every time, so then you don’t notice when you’ve spelled one wrong. I always add new words to the dictionary to avoid this happening, after being caught out several times.

The other thing your spellchecker doesn’t spot is malapropisms, where you’ve accidentally used the wrong word. A grammar checker would pick it up, but I don’t like using them as they never like anything I write!

So, now you’ve checked it says what you intended, there are a couple of things I’ve found that help me spot things that need changing. One is to leave the manuscript for a couple of weeks before looking at it again, the other is to read it out loud. That way you’ll more easily notice:

• Sentences that made sense at the time but now just seem gibberish
• Word echoes – using the same word repeatedly
• Tautology – saying the same thing twice
• Pointlessness - explaining things irrelevant to the plot
• Dullness – whole swathes of text where nothing happens
• Info dump – explaining the physics / history behind your story in one big paragraph
• Technobabble – info dump disguised as dialogue
• Other dull dialogue that adds nothing to the story


If you remove all of the above and discover that you have nothing left, it can be a bit disheartening.

Now it’s time to look at the word count. Every story must be as long as it needs to be to tell the tale, but you’ll find that it gets more difficult to find suitable markets as your manuscript gets longer. So now comes the most difficult bit. What else can you cut out without compromising the flow of the story? I know. You don’t want to cut out any of your lovingly crafted prose. So to make it easier, join a critiquing group where somebody you don’t know will go through your newly refined story and hack it to pieces all over again.

It’s all for your own good!