Fumbling through editing

I stumbled into writing, starting out being driven by sheer chutzpah, and now I’ve stumbled into editing with the same vigor. I wasn’t about to hand my rough draft off to an editor without first passing my own eyes over it―I just know there’s work to be done, and I might as well save the prospective editor some time, and me some money, by doing things like, well, fixing my paragraphs.

I realized that I was going to need some sort of structured approach to editing, so I’m journalling what I’ve done so far here.

The workflow I’ve arrived at involves exporting the root text as a word document, styling it with the main body in Century Schoolbook, double-spaced, with extra paragraph spacing and indent.

All of this sums up to a relatively easily readable, if over-set, manuscript. Easy to read, easy to edit. Lots of room for markup, as it turns out.

For the marking up, I debated using red ink, but decided I’d follow the intuition that it feels harsh, and reached for a blue-grey ink instead. I’ve had it loaded up in a True Writer I got years ago when Massdrop was still actually cool. I’ve already drained a fill on that pen on the first few chapters, so I expect this is going to be a thirsty project.

Once I do an initial hand-written pass, I come back and transcribe the edits I made into the markdown source; that’s the point where I decide if I like the final flow from this editorial round, and if not, I modify it further. In this sense, I’m sorta doing two rounds of editing in one. I’m specifically avoiding editing chapters in series in writing before importing those changes to the root document, because I want to make sure I’m in the mindset of the most recent revision before moving on―the differences are minor right now, but I could see this forcing larger story diversion later.

The thing that’s really getting me is how much of a different mindset editing is, and how much I’m enjoying re-reading what I wrote, even as I slice and transform it. Past me, I know you know how to use paragraph breaks.