At the time of writing this, I am hoping that my journey through the editing process has been completed - I stress the word hoping.
It took just under ten days in total, and my initial fear that my written work would become an unrecognizable heap of words, were quelled immediately. I drew in, and out, a deep sigh of relief! Primarily, the most that needed to be done was grammatical and the mechanics of some sentence structures needed tweaking. The story is still intact, if not better...in my opinion.
By grammatical, I mean those annoying and confusing semi-colons. Some people hate them, some love them, teachers drone on about them, MS Word just confuses you... Sigh. It is safe to say that whatever you learned at school during English class, or what you thought you learned, can be tossed right out the window. It seems the use of semi-colons, now, are as outdated and unpopular as bad eggs. My editor forwarded me some very handy sites where I could peruse away on the proper use of semi-colons. Strange, it still looked like the same thing I learned at school, so I didn't feel too bad. Yet, I noticed that the plain and simple coma is much preferred these days...
It's a never-ending learning process, it would seem.
Some sentences, in my enthusiasm to tell my story, appeared or was 'sketchy' or left you to wonder "what then?" So, those were duly noted for me to elaborate on, or re-write, so that the reader would not be left to ponder. Other areas/sentences were a little unclear, so I had to re-word it so it made some sense.
Point of view issues were scattered throughout the book and obediently corrected. I was enlightened, to say the least. I forget sometimes that I can't know what the other person is thinking, especially if I am the person telling the story from my point of view - I can merely observe that they looked irritated. Nor can I tell that my face looked worried by what the other person said because I really can't see my own face unless I kept looking at a mirror. I can merely state that I felt worried and noticed that the other person seemed to see it too on my face. As I stated before, in my enthusiasm to tell the tale, sometimes, I forget myself.
A few parts were moved from one chapter to another, mostly to make use of the topic that was being discussed, and therefore it would not clog the first chapter with unnecessary information. Can't have the potential reader falling asleep because I took too long to explain something, then prattled on about other things that really didn't have any point being there in the first place.
And that, basically, was it.
My imagined ordeal with the editing process, was thankfully, just in my imagination. I am so glad they are people out there called editors. I suppose, if my imagined ordeal was not so pleasant, I'd think differently. But as it is, mine was a very eye-opening and pleasant experience.
Now, I've more things to remember for the future books.
My brain is becoming quite crammed...
