Please come and talk to me. Just for some general writing chat and support...

[BiglyBadgers]

I am about a third of the way through editing my stupidly long book (this'll teach me for writing epic fantasy) and need some chat!

I really loved the chat and support on the nano thread, but now novel writing month is long gone and I am alone! There must be other people out there bumbling along needing a friend to chat to...surely....I can provide coffee, cake and excellent free WiFi

Well done Tippety

Well done! Take a wee break to refresh your mind and body - writing is work and you've done amazing :)

Thanks. Taking a break to binge read some books, and maybe write something fun, short and trashy, then start editing in a couple of months once I've got a bit of distance from the book.

Does anyone have any tips to make editing more constructive? I always end up floundering, going round in circles. I feel like I need some more structure to the process than just the nebulous 'make it good'.

This is a useful checklist of problems you might find yourself dealing with while editing, Tippety — Emma Darwin’s writing blog is very good in general:

emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2016/06/the-fiction-editors-pharmacopoeia-diagnosing-treating-symptoms.html

Or scroll down this one — it’s mostly about being professionally edited, but there’s some useful stuff on structural editing and line editing:

emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2018/04/being-published-part-2-editing.html

Great links, thank you! Slightly terrifying list of things to work through!

How's it going everyone? I've changed names since I last posted in this thread. I'm near the end of doing my first revision of my fantasy WIP. I had a few plot points to fix and some characters to change. Hopefully I just need to go over it one more time for any revision notes I've left myself and general polish and then I can submit it to agents. I've already started making a list!

I'm currently editing. I have several really helpful readers on Scribe and hoping to get it shortly to Beta read by some of them.

I had a lot of beta reads early on and a paid-for editor looked at my sample chapters but for some reason I don't really want beta readers for the whole project. Possibly a mistake, but I've worked on this book for way too long and I think I want it to stand on its own or not - so if I polish it up and it sinks without trace, that's annoying, but then I can move onto the next project. I don't want to spend much more time on it really.

But I think that's a personal thing because this book's been in the works for over ten years* and I want to have finished it but also want it off my plate!

*that sounds like a long time, but I stopped writing for years almost immediately after starting it, then had two kids. Most of it's been written/edit in three or four bursts of three months at a time.

Finished the structural revisions last night, so hopefully only a polish edit to go now. I've been using Scrivener for writing (I've found it very helpful with two character viewpoints and chapters that have moved around in the timeline) but now I think it's time to move it over to Word.