To compliment my review blog, I thought I'd share some of the thoughts and lessons I've picked up along the way in this crazy business of writing and publishing.
When I was yet-to-be-published, I read an awful lot of blogs (and still do) from people who'd been through a few more steps than I had, and it helped a lot.
I've just finished my second full-length novel, Breaking the Surface, a sequel to my previous scifi novel Beneath the Surface, so editing has been on the brain! Not the editing that happens in concert with my editors at NineStar Press, but the painstaking personal editing we do before even sending the manuscript off to those people.
Of course we edit a variety of things -- characterisation, language, plot holes and so on. But one of the jobs I have found both painful and imperative, is the removal of redundant words. These are words I use as a crutch in my early drafts, words that boost the word count but lessen the flow and hinder the pace.
Here are the main words I go back through and review, one at a time:
* That
* About
* Up
* Down
* Herself
* Himself
* Just
Consistently, I can delete approximately 50% of each word's usage throughout the book. For example, in Breaking the Surface, after reviewing each of these terms, the overall word count went down by 3,000.
What words do you need to look out for when you get into this sort of nitty-gritty editing? Are any of them the same as mine?
When I was yet-to-be-published, I read an awful lot of blogs (and still do) from people who'd been through a few more steps than I had, and it helped a lot.
I've just finished my second full-length novel, Breaking the Surface, a sequel to my previous scifi novel Beneath the Surface, so editing has been on the brain! Not the editing that happens in concert with my editors at NineStar Press, but the painstaking personal editing we do before even sending the manuscript off to those people.
Of course we edit a variety of things -- characterisation, language, plot holes and so on. But one of the jobs I have found both painful and imperative, is the removal of redundant words. These are words I use as a crutch in my early drafts, words that boost the word count but lessen the flow and hinder the pace.
Here are the main words I go back through and review, one at a time:
* That
* About
* Up
* Down
* Herself
* Himself
* Just
Consistently, I can delete approximately 50% of each word's usage throughout the book. For example, in Breaking the Surface, after reviewing each of these terms, the overall word count went down by 3,000.
What words do you need to look out for when you get into this sort of nitty-gritty editing? Are any of them the same as mine?
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