Printed Copy

I got the printed copy of my book today! For some reason that makes it all the more real. 

For better or worse it's true what they say, I have noticed more errors on the printed copy than I did reading it on my computer screen.

It was much thicker than I expected. It's only 150 pages (300 pages front and back), since I couldn't afford to get it printed double spaced. I'm happy that it still looks impressively thick. 

I'm off to the beach to read it next week. 

Editing

I have been Googling how to edit a novel. Most of the editing articles I've read have been useless. Some of them I questioned how good the writer could be if their articles were so dull. I did read a good one though that explained some common writing mistakes. It's coming in quite handy. 

http://litreactor.com/columns/8-words-to-seek-and-destroy-in-your-writing

I don't recommend eliminating all of a word, just the ones that are unnecessary. Sometimes the sentence makes perfect sense without the word in question or even sounds better without it.

I particularly liked how the author explained suddenly. If you tell your readers that something suddenly happens you are warning them and then it comes off as less sudden. It took me quite a while to fix this one issue. Editing is proving far more difficult than I anticipated. 

Another good site recommended to me by my sister is 

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl

She explains the dangling particle quite well which is what the 8 words author was getting at in his IS portion.

Writing Pace

I was looking back to see how quickly I wrote my novel. All but the first 24 thousand words were written in the last 17 days. I think this shows that starting to write is the most difficult part. It proves that you should keep at it. It will get easier once you get going and get used to writing.

I’d also like to note that my ideas were coming out so quickly at that stage that I probably have a lot of editing to do. Certainly proofreading those beginning 24 thousand words has proved difficult. 

I am mostly changing the way my character told the story because she has changed along the way, the sort of character she is, not developing her character. I have also found more than a few good ideas I had that I didn’t follow through with. I created a separate file for continuity, writing these ideas down along with my continuity errors, so I can try to work them into the later parts of my story.

Wordle

Wordle of my entire story.

I did a wordle when I was part way through and realized I had a giant JUST in the middle. I took out 100 just and paid attention to it from then on. Now I’m thinking LIKE is far too large, going to have to fix that next.

My First Book

Wednesday, July 24th, 2013 at 2:04 pm

I officially finished my first novel! Well, the rough rough draft of my first novel anyway. I started this book three months ago. At first I had to force myself to write and by the end that’s all I wanted to do.