Editing! Ugh!

I don’t know where all the rest of you are on your writing projects, or if you’re a writer at all, but here’s where I’m at. My first book is with the copy editor, but I’m going over it one last time (like the five revisions and twenty full edits weren’t enough) and surprisingly I’m still finding stupid things like a missing is in the middle of a sentence and your instead of you’re in a couple of spots.  I wonder how that’s possible. I’ve literally gone over it dozens of times, but they were there. Although this time I’m following someone’s advice and am reading it on my kindle. For some reason that made a difference.

And at the same time I’m doing some pretty major revisions of book #3.  Book #2 is currently pushed out of my mind as it waits for its turn with my editor.  I love revisions, they’re a lot more fun and a lot less frustrating than finding out you left out the verb in a sentence you’ve read a hundred times.  It’s funny, as I’m immersed in this process I find myself editing everything. I had to catch myself the other day from pointing out to someone that they’d used the same adjective twice in the same sentence. (hee, hee, did you notice I just did it too?)

Have any of you found any tricks that helped you with editing? Someone else told me to print it all out just like you would for your editor and do it that way.

If any of you are in the Lockport, NY area tonight, our SCBWI writing group is meeting at Panera at 7pm for some good coffee, sweeties, and encouragement for this often lonely road.

Take care,

Melanie