Speed Editing (Cecilia Peartree)

What I'm about to describe is not my usual way of editing and certainly not particularly recommended! Still, it seems to have worked this time.

I had been worried all along that I wouldn't get the 29th novel in my mystery series finished before being summoned into hospital for my heart surgery. I worried that if I had to have a long break from writing, I would completely forget where I was going with the story, and the whole thing would turn out as disjointed as one of my previous novels in the series, the one entitled 'Unrelated Incidents' because that was more or less what the plot consisted of. Fortunately this title fitted in with those of some others in the same series ('Unpredictable Events' and 'Unsafe Distances', for instance).

I have just completed this latest one, and edited and published it in record time, thanks to a more or less unexpected combination of circumstances.

As I write this, there is still no sign of a message from the hospital, which in some ways is quite annoying, and I may have to embark on another novel before long to keep my anxiety at bay. The delay has already had a knock-on effect on the family's holiday arrangements, as they don't want to be out of the country or even at the other end of the UK when I'm on the operating table. Because I will get a week's notice of my surgery, they decided to go away last week, leaving my younger son and me in charge of their cats, which in turn meant that I spent four days at their house with nothing much to do except to edit my book.

A little helper

In most cases this process couldn't possibly have been finished in the time. It was only possible because (a) while writing the first draft I had done what I don't usually do, which was to read over the previous day's writing every day before starting to write the next bit, and (b) I had gone back to unravel some of the glitches as I went along, instead of doing it the NaNoWriMo way and pressing on regardless. These two factors meant that instead of ending up with a draft bristling with asterisks where I had marked things I couldn't be bothered sorting out yet, I only found one place where I'd done this. I think the possibility of having to abandon the thing temporarily when I went into hospital had helped me to make it as tidy as I could.

My editing process was to read through three chapters at a time on my tablet, making notes as I went along about where the story was going and also wording I wanted to change. The next step was to do the changes I'd identified, while keeping an eye open for inconsistencies and what I always think of as continuity errors. Then I would have lunch and tidy up after myself and the cats, before repeating this for the next three chapters. Fortunately this was quite a short book with 26 chapters, so I was almost finished my edit by the end of the four days, and have been able to spellcheck, format and publish it since then. 

An Unsweetened Revenge