Summer Journal 2013 - Entry #5

The week before last I got the pre-Galley file on This Feels Like Home from my editor. TWRP goes on summer shut down for the July Fourth week, so she said there was no rush in getting it back to her. However, I figured last week was a good a week as any to tackle the read-through, so I did. I approached it with my 'read-it-from-the-back-forward' strategy, which works well to keep me out of the story and really focused on mistakes.

At this point, we're not looking for any major story changes, just minor edits in word usage, spelling, grammar, formatting, etc. Even though the mss has been gone over several times by both of us, I still managed to find lots of corrections.

Most of them were indeed formatting errors. A couple pages had a blank line in the middle. There were several places where italics were needed and weren't showing up. I found one miss-spelling on the brag page and one usage/spelling error: 'where' instead of 'were'. The first chapter ends with only one word on the final page, which is not only a waste of printing space, but kind of makes it really awkward to get the full impact of the hook, so I'm hoping we can find a way to combine a couple of paragraphs in the first chapter just to get that one word attached to the rest of the chapter. And then there were just a few inconsistencies when using the word 'national' to refer to Jake's rodeo dreams. Sometimes the word was used with a capital 'N' and sometimes a lowercase 'n'. So we need to decide which way we want to go. I also want to remove a set of lines from the teaser excerpt at the beginning of the book.

Nothing hugely major or complicated, but enough that when I typed out the list of errors/corrections, it filled a page and a half. But this is the time to catch all those sorts of things. It's highly annoying when I'm reading one of my own books and find errors...but it happens!

In addition to editing, I also made more headway on my WIP. I'm up to a little over 12,000 on "One Great Night" and plan on working on at least one major scene today. (The idea has been spinning in my head all night.) At this point, I'm thinking the story will be about a 20,000 word novella, so I'm a bit more than halfway done. That said, I never know what direction my characters are going to take me sometimes, so it may turn out to be a bit longer. Only time will tell.

I still haven't dug into anything promotion-wise for The Vampire and the Vixen or This Feels Like Home, but I know what needs to be done, so it's just a matter of doing it...before all of my coupons for bookmarks and postcards expire!

All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with my week. And now I'm going to sign off and get to work on that scene!

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com