On Editing...and Editing...and Editing....

You know that phase of editing where you're analyzing everything? Yeaaaah. I'm there. I have nine more chapters to edit (out of twenty-nine) for Rising Book 1. I'm editing five chapters at a time, first on paper, then making changes on the computer. It is long and exhausting. It's a good thing I like words as much as I do. (I really, really do like editing. I like making something better. I like grammar. I just have a hard time resting when I'm at the end of an editing project.) When it came time to read to my kids at bedtime yesterday, it was so hard to not analyze every sentence I read. I've been searching for missing words (I've found several), extra words (found that too), and passive sentences (ohhh, way too many to count), and cleaning up text and smoothing out dialogue, etc., etc.

I was joined in my editing by Tonks, one of our cats.

"What is this mess? I can do better than this."

"Forget it, I'm taking over."

"Why are you still here? I've totally got this."

There's only so much editing a person can do on a book. 

Wait, let me rephrase: There's only so much editing a person can do on a book before they have to let it go into other hands. Writers will pick and tweak and edit and revise and set their books aside and then do it all over again...and again...because a book is never really done until it it has to be, until it's time for it to go to the printer. And even then, there's much nail-biting. "What if I missed something? What if people pick out a mistake and that's all they notice? What if I forget something? What if, what if, what if..."

I'm sure I've said this in previous blog posts, but sometimes you really just need to smack those what ifs in the face.

It takes a lot to write a book, a lot more to edit and rewrite, and I think sometimes that (annnd I'm editing while I'm blogging O.O) it takes a backbone of steel to let the book go out of our hands and into someone else's.

A lot of you are in various stages of book writing. Starting the first draft of your first book. Working on your tenth novel. Rewriting. Editing. Putting it through beta-readers and critique partners. Perfecting a query. Looking for an agent. Self-publishing. Signing a contract with a publishing company. Handing out review copies. Marketing. Whatever you're doing right now, it takes a lot of work and a lot of courage, so be proud of yourself that you're doing it.

Now I am going to attempt to get some sleep so I can work on more editing tomorrow. Then I get to move on to final blurb tweaking. Oh, joy. <---*sarcasm*

Hope you all have an awesome weekend! ^_^