An Editors Work Is Never Done
Still editing. Well, maybe not editing in the classic sense anymore. It’s more sewing together a garment that has been ripped at the seams, copied in a different fabric and then sewn back together in that new fabric. Bound to be some gaps and missing stiches.
After editing in autocrit, saving it to Word [which I don’t have but Google Docs lets you save to] and then back to google docs to put all the different pieces back together, I spent the day filling gaps and closing rips. My first chapter is polished to shine and formatted the way Pitch Wars recommends. Not quite the same with the remaining 40 or so chapters in the 37k word book.
For some strange reason, neither autocrit or google will let me eliminate the gap between paragraphs that google docs automatically uses. IF I get a mentor interested enough to ask for any more of the book, they will get a manuscript that is in excellent condition and meets all the criteria, except for the aforesaid gap. I can only hope my formatting skills are not on trial! lol.
After the pieces were joined together, I returned to the top page to soothe the rough spots. And discovered that one entire section of about 10k words had been pasted twice! That meant a frantic search to see if I had merely posted it twice or if I had overwritten the original segment. Fortunately I had double pasted. Whew. Easy fix.
The hardest part is this; Leave the darn thing alone! An artist friend of mine told me once that one of the most important things an artist needs to know, is when to stop. So I’m stopping. I’m stopping fiddling with it, stopping poking at it. Grammar, spelling, word choice, pacing, all those things important to a book have been addressed as best I can right now. I’m sure a mentor will find stuff to improve. Heck, that’s WHY I want a mentor! I’ve worked years on this book, it’s gone through numerous iterations. I’m willing to work more to make it a book worth publishing.