Wednesday 22nd July 2020

Today I managed to get the final tweaks done to the draft.

I finished by rewriting a conversation designed to impart a little of the lore without being an infodump. It also gave me chance to expand the racial diversity of my world a little. I always try and make those scenes very dialogue heavy with interesting characters so the reader is laughing along with the conversation rather than feeling they’re being lectured. I think it’s better than what was there.

And with that I’m now onto the final stage. The final readthrough.

I seemed to spend an awful lot of time this afternoon creating an ebook of the draft. I like to make my own covers to make it feel like a real book, but to be honest it took me less time to knock that up than it did trying to work out how to get the metadata right so it listed as the right book name and author when I transferred it to my kindle.

The chapter formatting is off but this ebook is just for me. It’s a last pass to go through and see if I can find any problems before I send it off. It can be a bit of a ball ache though. I’ve read this story a ridiculous number of times, but here we go again.

I have to be aware of my bias here. I’ve heard it said that you know when you’re done editing a book when you hate it. I’m not quite that bad, but I am very critical. I have to remember that I may hate these words because I’ve read them a hundred times, but to most readers it’ll be the first time they’ve encountered them.

I have to be critical, and highlight if something is bad. I don’t have to hate on the novel.

That said, I always view the fact that I can keep coming back to this story and loving the characters and story as a very good sign. It might not be the type of book you would want to read but it’s certainly the type of book I would want to.

But for now, it’s a couple of days of endless reading. I’ll break it up with some gaming and other activities but I really need to plough through it so I’m done for the weekend.