I just finished the 2nd round of edits on Wicked 4. I have exactly 4 weeks to get this polished up and sent off to the publisher and with my vacation coming up right in the middle of that (I’ll be gone for an entire week) I’m already getting nervous! I loathe edits like hot pokers to the skull. They’re tedious and not in any way as fun as actually writing. Someone asked me what my process was so I thought I’d post it. Every writer does it differently and my method is only one way of doing it. I’m very anal about it to so most of what I do is pure overkill. Lol But it is what it is.
Lily’s Insane Editing Process:
1st round: When the story is complete, I let it sit for a few weeks to let my brain draw away from the story a bit. When I do open the MS back up, I re-read it from beginning to end and change any glaring mistakes I find, tighten up loose ends and delete extra junk that doesn’t really need to be there. It’s not unusual for me to go over the story several times during this process to make sure I’ve caught as much as I can. Once it’s semi-shiny, I bundle it all up and send it to my critique partners and editor.
2nd round: When I get the copies back I’ve sent out, usually all marked up in red or blue ink, I read every note that’s been attached and go back to that section and fix what they’ve found/didn’t like. This process takes the most time because every ‘reader’ views the story differently so they each see different things. It could be a simple typo or an entire scene they’ve questioned so the 2nd round actually takes me the longest.
3rd round: Once I get the edits done I again let the story sit so it isn’t so fresh in my mind. I have a tendency to memorize the lines so when I read them, I see what I ‘know’ should be there, not necessarily what ‘is’ there. When I go back to the story, I re-read it again, with all the corrections, and see how it all sounds, making any little changes I find alone the way.
4th round: After all the readings, I’ve pretty much caught everything I can with my eye so I then print the entire story out and make a PDF of it as well. With the print out in hand I have the PDF read to me in that awful computer voice while I follow along on the printed pages, highlighting any typos or clunky sounding phrases/sentences. It takes forever to do this but I can ‘hear’ things I can’t necessarily see so this step is the most important to me. You wouldn’t believe the typos you can find doing this. The funniest one I ever ran across was the word, t-shirt… I ‘saw’ t-shirt on the page but what I ‘heard’ was…t-shit, which was actually what I had typed out. No one had caught this up to this point. Imagine if I hadn’t seen THAT one. Hehehe So, Once I’ve listened to the entire doc, marking all the bad, I then go back to the original doc and make all the changes I’ve highlighted.
5th round: This is my final stage. The one where it ‘should’ be sparkly clean and squeaking like a little… squeaky thing. I re-read it…Again. Normally, I find very little in this last pass. If I find ONE thing wrong, I automatically read it again from start to finish until I see NOTHING wrong with it. Once I’m finished and pleased with the way it’s turned out, I zip it all up with the cover images and send it on it’s way as a finished product. I then sweat buckets thinking I didn’t catch something and wait until release day, biting my nails wondering if some obscure typo made it through 5 rounds of edits and will make the reader wonder what a complete nutter I really am in which, by this time, I AM a complete nutter. After spending months on a single story, how could I NOT be?
So, that’s my process. As you can see, it’s quite time consuming and also the reason it takes me so long to produce a new story. I’m not a fast writer to begin with, usually, and this editing process I have takes me at least a month, sometimes longer, depending on how long the story is. It’s never fun but the end result is a story I’m proud to put my name on and one I hope you, the reader, have enjoyed.
When Macy Carter’s parents order her to bring her live-in boyfriend Sean home with her for Christmas she has no idea that her little white lie is just about to snowball into a fabrication of monstrous proportions. Sean isn’t her boyfriend, he’s her boss. Now she has to reveal the lie she’s been telling her family for the past two years or hastily concoct an elaborate ruse to fool them instead.
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