I have been working on the editing thing for almost a week now.  Its not all that I’ve been doing.  I’ve written a couple of short stories, worked on my 100-word challenge and punched out a few blogs, oh and lets not forget work, being with my family and coaching soccer. I feel like I should be making more progress despite the rest of my life keeping me busy.

What it really comes down to is that editing is hard work.  First you have to re-read your own material, which can be hard enough on its own. Then you have to look for errors and things that need fixing including grammar, punctuation, plot holes and just plain bad writing, while trying not to be overly critical because as your own worst critic you may very well want to take your work and delete the whole thing.  Having written Alone in the way that I did I have discovered some major changes I need to make in the style and tense.  It started out in present tense with a bit of a flashback and I know that later on I turn it into a sort of journal, but the last half or so I write in past tense from the perspective of events long past. Shit. Shit. Shit. So I’ve started making some of the corrections as I’m going and will fix the bigger parts as I get to them.  Worst case I will have to do a major re-write of the first half of the book, which I suppose is what the editing and rewriting process is all about.

On a semi-related note, I finally got the information about the North Carolina writer’s conference in November. Yeah, I am so not going. Doing it for one day on the cheap will still end up costing me $200 and that’s not including food, gas or anything else. Its kind of looking like this conference is for those who do this whole writing thing for a living. Sure I could write it off for tax puposes, but I can’t afford it in the first place.  Oh well, maybe next year.

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