Editing – the bane of any writer’s existence. Having to go through the work you thought was faultless and finding all these mistakes, it makes you doubt yourself. It’s been a word haunting me these last few weeks and is one of my least favourite tasks when writing my book series. However, it has to be done and there’s no getting away with it. After all, if we all just stuck with our first drafts we wouldn’t learn and we wouldn’t progress.

The first rule of editing, is lower your own expectations of yourself and then you might just keep surprising yourself if it’s better than you think! It’s a good idea with the first few drafts to self-edit the small things like spelling mistakes, incorrect words, missing punctuation, but more importantly look at your storyline, your characters and see if there are any plot holes that need filling up (also keep a search engine open to do your fact checking!)

Before I chose to publish Atlantic Split, I had a manuscript critique by Scribendi which involved someone giving my book a read through, not to check for mistakes, but to check what worked and what didn’t and if the book had a future. Expensive business mind. Secondly, I gave the book to people known as beta readers, who would be able to read the book as an impartial person and provide their opinions. Even though most of them only just got a couple of chapters at a time, it was so useful even to see patterns in their feedback. These readers and editors hadn’t been reading and writing the book like I had day in day out for over ten years, so they could see it in a light I hadn’t even considered. They suggested points that made so much sense, but I hadn’t even considered because I had been blinded with how I thought my book should be. 

I had to make three massive changes to the book, but I was glad I listened and in fact a little angry that I hadn’t realised these things myself! It just goes to show that nothing is perfect and you have to be humble, be open to change and realise that you’re not invincible. You have to take on board the feedback you get, especially if lots of people are picking up on the same things, and choose which bits need changing and which bits you can choose to ignore. At the end, you might just get a better result.

This whole process has been a learning curve and even now there’s still editing to do, and I’m sure there always will be. However, you have to get to the point where you decide that enough is enough and go for it – or else you never get anywhere! Nothing’s perfect, nothing ever will be. Just make sure that by that point at least 99% of it is good! It doesn’t come overnight, I know, it’s been hard graft getting to where I am now and I’m sure there’s still going to be much more to do! However, it’s all been worth it so far, even just as a journey of self-improvement and learning how to become an extrovert!

Atlantic Split is the first book in The Luke Bright Series and will be available to purchase in early 2018. Please follow me on my blog and my social media links below for more updates on when the book will be released and where you can purchase a copy. Thank you once again for taking the time to read this blog post.