Editing for The Edge of the Sphere is officially underway. For the most part, I was able to take what I had learned from the editing process with Searching the Skies and apply it in order to deliver a cleaner manuscript the first time around. It’s a longer book, but there didn’t seem to be as much red e-ink from my wonderful editor on it, so to speak.
That said, it appears that the majority of the stuff I need to fix falls into one of two categories: repeated words/phrases and adverb abuse. I guess I really haven’t learned much. Maybe having blog posts about those things for the world to see will hold me accountable for such grievous errors in the future. (There were a couple of places where the number of adverbs was cringe-worthy. I’d like to know what I was smoking when 1) I wrote it, and 2) all the times I proofread it. I think I need an adverb support group.)
In addition to having to hack ‘n’ slash at least three quarters of my adverbs, I have a new word to add to my list of repeated words from my previous post: “still”. I used it waaaaaaaay too much, and now I’m noticing it my current writings. Super. At least I cut down on the number of “but”s!
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever really get this writing thing down. Probably not. Then again, if we all got things done perfectly on the first try, editors would be out of work. I’ll just look at my “still”s and “but”s and “-ly” words as stimulating the economy.