Deja Vu

Right after I finished Ghostwriter, I plunged right into my second novel. I knew that there would be an editing process on the first one, but I wasn't worried. I was pretty confident the manuscript was "clean" and there would be just a few minor grammar errors here and there.

Little did I know...

Ghostwriter is now in its last stages of the process. I've signed off on it, which was a lot more difficult than I expected. As much as I thought I would be delighted to be free of editing the manuscript any more, coming to the point where it was finished and I couldn't make any further changes was daunting, especially since I found an error at the eleventh hour.

How on earth I missed it the first fifteen times, I will never know

Now, I'm starting the substantive edits on my post-apocalyptic novel. The substantive edits consist of the editor reading through the manuscript for general issues like plot holes, unanswered questions, contradictions in the plot, things that need clarification, etc.

I never knew what a bad writer I was until I wrote a book.

Long story short: it needs a lot of work. I now wish I had waited to write it until after my first book had gone through the entire process. I made a lot of the same mistakes in the second manuscript. Now that I know what to look for, I'm finding all sorts of issues and there are sections which need to be re-written.

I bit off a little bit more than I can chew. I'm putting in twelve hour days, trying to finish up projects while still keeping up with the editing process. It's  a lot of work. I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm just finding that there aren't enough hours in the day and dates on the calendar are starting to seem ominous.

Even out-of-date calendars

I had considered submitting the manuscript for my third novel before the cut-off date, but it's just not ready. I know I could have scrambled around to get it in decent-enough shape for consideration, but rushing something is rarely a good idea and I'm hoping to use the lessons I've learned in the editing process to turn over a better manuscript this time.