Editing for Createspace

Still plodding on with editing Matho for Createspace. If I write dialogue with a French accent, I wanted  the character Lennox drop his aitches and I represented this as follows: 'there is nothing 'e will do for you.' Sometime Createspace formatted it perfectly and sometimes it ignored the apostrophe and just printed the letter e. There's probably a reason, but I haven't figured it out. After three tries I rewrote the phrase and did not use a dropped aitch!

Otherwise it seems to be going well. I've removed a lot of unnecessary commas and corrected the occasional missing letter or word, but on the whole things are proceeding well. The trouble with editing is it seems to go on for ever and a day! The book is running out at 104,000 word count and I have the last 60 pages still to do. I've been at it all week, and find I can only do it in relatively short snatches otherwise I start "reading" instead of "checking." Maybe I'll think about paying someone to do it next time. It is not a job I would like to do day in and day out.

The other thing is the temptation to keep on tinkering and phrasing things differently - I hope, in a better and more pleasing way. Once I get this portion of the work done, I will have to think about covers, and for Createspace I need not only a front cover, but a spine and back cover too. Another learning curve to master, and my deadline approaches with a steady beat. I don't think I need a list of chapters formatted for searching, as you do with Kindle, because in a print book that's not possible. I am thinking about including a simple map of the main places. It's OK for me since I live in the area and know where Stirling and Dumbarton, Carlisle and Corbridge are, but  I can't expect everyone else to know.

Looking back

I loaded a post on Historical Fiction excerpts this morning and it made me realise how much time I've been on this writing game. I began in a very tentative way back in the seventies, when a typewriter and a bottle of sno-pak were the tools of the writers trade. Progress was slow, because I was working full-time, and leading a good social life most of the time. The pile of pages grew so very slowly!

Now, a writer's life is comparatively easy, thanks to computers. It is very easy to produce a page of immaculate typing, perfectly formatted on the page/screen, run it through the spell-and-grammar checker and be assured that it as correct as it is ever going to be. Even better, the internet makes finding facts easy if you are prepared to accept the first you find without cross-checking for accuracy.

But no matter how impressive a perfectly formatted and typed page seems, it is the content that is so vitally important. "Rubbish writing" can look equally as good as the most literary writing! Like most other skills, writing a story has to be learned skill. I doubt there's one writer in a thousand successful writers who made it with their first attempt. I know I look back on my earliest attempts and itch to get the red pen out and delete the repetitions, remove the unnecessary sentences. Maybe one day I will, if only for my own satisfaction. But looking back has made me realise how far I have come, and gives me an inkling of how far I have still to go. I suppose writing is a skill that just goes on growing until brain fade occurs.