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Friday, November 19, 2021

Writing Colonies XL: All About Editing

Here's the graphic:


The green Roman numerals mean I've completed the first of my planned edit phases.  Here they are:

  1. "Run-and-Gun Edit."  Basically, I read the book and fix misspellings, word choices, etc., as I go.  Pretty quick.
  2. "Tone Edit."  I read everything a bit more slowly and make sure the "feel" of each chapter/book works.  Sometimes I find that I can get flowery in some places and not flowery enough in others.  Maybe the difference comes down to the mood I was in the day I wrote it.  I'm not sure.  Regardless, this edit will be about evening things up a bit and making sure the tone fits with that portion of the story and ones adjacent to it.
  3. "Chronological Edit."  This one's unique to Colonies of Kobol.  Because I've separated the story into sixteen separate books covering each of the Colonies of Kobol, I've had to jump around in the timeline a bit.  I could have written everything in order, but that would have been one massive book and not sixteen more manageable ones.  (For those interested in a chronological read, I intend to include a chronological table of contents so, once you've read it through once, you can read it again in a more linear fashion.)  With this one, I'll start at Book One: Earth, then go to the first part of Book Two: Gemenon, then the first chapter of Book Four: Virgon, then all of Book Three: Leonis, then the first part of Book Eight: Picon, then the first part of Book Five: Sagittaron, ... you get the idea.  All to make sure the continuity holds up and everything makes sense across the different worlds  (mentions of events in one book frequently appear in dialogue in others).  I may even throw in a re-read of Lords of Kobol and a re-watch of Caprica and BSG in the appropriate spots to make sure it fits the universe.  Depending on time, we'll see.
  4. "Paper Edit."  Basically, I print the whole thing out and read it, red pen in hand, so I may make the pages run red with the blood of its errors.  Reading the book in different media helps me find mistakes I've missed in other read-throughs, I've found.
  5. "Device Edit."  Similar to the "Paper Edit," I read this on a handheld device of some sort, again, so I might catch mistakes that slipped through previous edits.

And that's it.  Five different edit phases.  So, when that graphic is full of green "V"s, you'll know it's time to move toward publishing.  Wow.

And when will that be?  I have a plan, but much like the show, I'm not telling just yet.  Let's see how the next editing phases go.

Thanks for reading.

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