Inch by inch

Today I took a break from cutting words and condensing chapters to work on the grammatical side of editing. It's tedious, but necessary, and I always dread going through all the little bits and pieces. 

I know that if I get an agent and that agent gets me hooked up with a decent sized publisher, I'll have access to their editor. That's nice and all, but if I don't do my own editing beforehand, the agent may not take a second look at my manuscript. Sometimes all it takes is a missing word here or the word "a" where it should've been "an." In a novel with over 140,000 words, there's going to be a lot of hiccups, not matter how good your grammar normally is. 

It doesn't help that the writing process doesn't care about the editing process. By that I mean that when you're writing, you're not supposed to think about the little bits and pieces. You aren't supposed to stop and focus on the minutiae or you'll never get the story out! I know. I've stopped to fix paragraphs... then chapters... then completely had to rewrite those chapters... and now those are stories that I've abandoned. I got too bogged down fixing the mechanics that I never got the core material out of my head.

So now that all 55 chapters of material (they're short chapters!) I've got a lot a material to sort through. Fortunately I have some assistance, but still... it's lot. And it's kinda boring. But I gotta do it.

Fortunately... it's NaNoWriMo, so I have something to distract me! Keep your eyes peeled for the next short story... which may or may not have President Teddy Roosevelt in it.

DFTBA