Yesterday I sat down with my manuscript and began editing. Content editing, mainly.
I love editing as much as I hate it.
It's amazing to take a rough draft and sculpt it into something publishable. At the same time, the amount of work that goes into revising a first draft is HUGE. For me, it is the longest, hardest, most painful part of the entire process from first idea to hitting the publish button.
Since I began HIDDEN more than a year ago, it's changed drastically. I need to almost completely rewrite the entire first act.
This does not make Megg happy. It makes Megg very grouchy.
For the foreseeable future, I'll be buried in those pages with a red pen and a purple highlighter. I'll be cursing and crying, and I'll likely quit a million times. Then I'll transfer to my computer with the damaged and beaten manuscript in my hands. Slowly I'll make all of those changes. I'll rewrite the ugly passages. I'll fill in the missing pieces.
And when I'm done, that's when HIDDEN will fly through the internet to my first editor.
How long will all of this take? I don't know. I worked for nine hours yesterday. I may slip in even more today and tomorrow. I could be done by Friday. It may not be until the week after. I just don't know. I'll work my butt off until it's done.
If you want specifics, here's what I'm looking for in my manuscript in this pass:
Any/all grammatical errors
Repeated words/phrases
Correct character names/spelling
Awkward sentences/phrases
Proper timeline
Chapters in the correct order
Story flow
Continuity
...pretty much anything that isn't perfect must be ripped to shreds
Wish me luck!
XoXo,
Megg
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