The Price of Demand Edit in Progress

Just a quick update tonight. I’ve been working on the editing of The Price of Demand all day. I finished the first draft review on paper, and as suspected, there was an awful lot to fix. I used a LOT of ink crossing stuff out and writing notes!

Since then I’ve been doing the second draft pass in Scrivener, folding in the changes from the first round and doing further edits as I encounter things I missed.

If all goes well I expect to have the third draft complete tomorrow, and at that point I’ll begin converting it into an eBook as well as posting the update to the Draft Stories blog.

And now back to it…

The Editing Process, Part 2

My quest to maintain an entirely digital editing process has encountered a bump in the road, and I’ve resorted to printing out stories on dead trees to go over with one of those archaic writing implements people used to use decades ago. Pens, I think they’re called. Ah well.

On the plus side, the delay that this struggle caused me has left me almost completely cut off from The Price of Demand, the story I’m currently editing. It was the first Prices story I completed back in November, and this last month that I’ve spent in zombie land has been very kind to my ability to edit the proto-steampunk material I wrote before.

Reading The Price of Demand makes me realize just how many bad sections there are, but also how much there is that I still genuinely like about it. Over all I’m kind of encouraged. I’m not ready just yet to tear the whole thing up and throw it away! This is progress.

I still think most of the editing will be done digitally, but I bow before the ability of paper to make things look really different. I’m going to have to redouble my efforts to eliminate the paper from the process though, simply because I’ve been all digital so long now that I really am not equipped with enough free desk space to work with sheets of paper comfortably.

The next big challenge in editing awaits me, and that is making sure that I don’t spend far too much time in Minecraft and/or Star Wars: The Old Republic. They’re way too tempting. 

I figure once I’ve edited each story and gotten it into an ‘improved/revised’ state, I’ll post the eBook versions to the site for download too. I haven’t done that yet because I haven’t been completely happy with them so far. I am a bit of a perfectionist though so I’ll have to restrain that impulse and just treat those eBook versions as rough works too.

Google+ Hangouts and Editing

A lot of my planned working time was taken up unexpectedly tonight by a really fantastic Google+ hangout. Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer of Discovery.com) and several other astronomers were aiming a telescope at the sky and looking at the moon, at Saturn and several of its moons, and at several constellations in real-time online. It was fascinating, and inspiring.

It made me start to think about other uses for hangouts. I know writers have taken to doing writing hangouts, which I haven’t tried yet. Has anyone tried an editing hangout? It could be done as part fiction reading, part suggestion/critique/workshopping. It seems like that could be an interesting way to take advantage of the technology, as well as solve some of the issues I was having conceptually with editing in public.

I’ll have to put the idea out there on Google+ in particular, see what users there think. If you’re on Google+ and would be interested in something like that, add me to your circles and let me know.

The Editing Process

I’ve been at this full time writing thing for a little over 2 months now and I have plenty to show for it; 7 completed stories is not too bad at all I think. They cover a decent range of plot and theme and there’s even a little genre variety thrown in for good measure. They’re all first draft though, and that’s a problem.

I think it’s time to shift gears into phase 2 of this project, and that is beginning the editing process.

This doesn’t let me off the hook with writing. I still have to post every single day, and for WIP500, I still have to write a minimum of 500 words a day, though that’s 500 a day on average.

The problem of the editing process has occupied the back of my mind since I finished the first story back at the beginning of NaNoWriMo. The second problem of how to integrate the editing process into the writing process without stopping the writing has occupied another corner of my mind since near the end of NaNoWriMo when I was beginning to build up a decent backlog of work.

I think I’m just going to make it a very simple and straight-forward system. I’m trying to write in public as much as possible, and I’d like to do the same with editing wherever possible too. Every day I’ll put up a post about how the editing is going, what I’ve been changing in a given story and why, the direction I’m trying to take it in. This will stop me from posting 5000 different drafts of each story. I may still post significant draft updates though, if people are interested in seeing them.

Feedback Requested

This editing process is where I’m going to be most in need of feedback from my readers, and that begins with suggestions on how I could be doing better in presenting material.

Some time back during NaNoWriMo someone on Google+ suggested that it was a pain to read things online and then have to email me or leave a comment in order to provide feedback, and that I might want to make my work available in eBook formats, as PDFs, etc. I thought this was a pretty good idea; I don’t know that it’ll make giving me feedback any easier, but it will certainly make it easier for you to read and that can only be a good thing.

Formats

I’ll be spending some time over the next day or so doing exactly that. Everything will still be available in the blog of course, but I’ll be making .mobi, .epub and .pdf versions of the first drafts available for download.

Once this is done, I’d love to hear what you think about it.

I’d also love suggestions on other things I could be doing to make things easier or better.

The Future

One idea I’ve been kicking around in the back of my head is to borrow a page from Scott Sigler’s book, so to speak, and release audiobook readings. This would, of course, only occur after a story was all edited and finished.

I’ve never done any kind of long term reading like that, but it’s at least something I could try, as an experiment. See how people like it, if I’m any good at it, what the response is, etc.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I’d love your feedback; please feel free to leave comments on the blog or stories, or to email me, or to get back to me on Twitter at @fictionimprob, or at my Google+ profile at http://gplus.to/GordMcLeod. Hope to hear from you all soon!