June 2021

    I finished a story about automation that is sitting and waiting for an edit. I have not started anything new this month as my focus has been on closing out a large project at the office. 

    As I was thinking about editing, I realized I have not done a post about editing. When I started editing, I had to remember everything I do to edit. This month was as good a time as any to put a list together. 

• After completing a story, set it aside for approximately 1 week to 10 years - this is the easy part.
• It's easy because it seems like you are doing nothing, but in reality, there are so many other things to do that I don't think of it.
• Dig the story out in whatever format it's in, and then I print it out.
• If it's a weird format, I'll move it to whatever program I plan to edit it in and make it printable. Right now, that is Scrivener. 
• Read the printed-out story and marvel at how not bad or bad it is. It's ok - I'm editing.
• I have to work hard not to start editing at this point. I am reading it to get a full feel of the story.
• Read it again and start to cross outlines that need to go away, make notes about things that need to be rewritten or expanded upon
• This is the fun part where you can tear it up, scratch it out, and then try to figure out/remember why you typed ***** next to a word. It was something important when I was writing, making it easy to find and fix. 
• Load the story in the editing application and start making the changes 
• This is a copy of the original - always keep a copy of the original... for fun, I don't really know why but I do. If I made multiple attempts at editing, then I have multiple copies.
• When the rewriting is complete and the story makes more sense, turn on text to speech and let the computer read every sentence back to you. 
• I use the Mac British English Voice - Oliver
• If it sounds weird - fix it.
• After the edits and read-backs, I load each chapter into a grammar checking program. I use Grammarly.
• It's not perfect, but it can catch stuff I will totally miss. 
• Fix it. Use the recommendations you like and get rid of the ones you don't 
• Once I'm done in Grammarly, I put the story back together.
• Sometimes I'll put it into a folder and never look at it again.
• Sometimes I'll think about publishing it myself.
• Sometimes I'll think about submitting it to a magazine or an agent.
• In the end, I begin writing another story because it's easier than trying to publish or get a story published.

    

    So what else for the month of June? I read the Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and reading the second one now. A novella in the series was recommended to me by a beta reader as an excellent character study. So I picked up the whole series. I enjoyed the first one. 

    Also, this month I age another year, and the mid-'40s is a pretty interesting and good age to be. I have been trying to work out more, but that's basically yoga and long walks after dinner with my wife. One day maybe we'll convert that to a slow jog and some strength-building workouts. Maybe?

    I also began helping my daughter work through her first long story. She's planning on writing 500 words every weekday throughout the summer. I am acting as her guide and cheerleader sharing what I have learned writing long stories. Sometimes it's a slog, and you wonder what the point is, but sometimes it's amazing, and the words are easy. I'm excited for her to hit the first 10,000 words, just like I'm excited for every 10,000 words I hit. It's a weird number that's a little difficult to hit but super attainable, and she should hit it in a couple of weeks.

    That's it for June.

Thanks for reading, 

And here's a photo of me trying to crush the strawberry super moon (Photo Credit: Jennifer Gammon)