First Edit

Yesterday brought to an end a three-week period of editing, the first in a series of rounds which will sharpen the focus of the stories, check facts, and correct grammatical errors — and this is before I send the manuscript off to my publisher, which I plan to do in February. This round, and all the rest, follows a routine established with the first book: I read aloud each profile and imagine I’m telling the story to an audience. This usually happens in my favorite chair in our sunroom early in the morning. The “audience” is my faithful pug, Bella. As I read, I think about the flow of the story, the structure of the sentences and paragraphs, and cadence of the words. The manuscript is marked up accordingly.

This round took a week of mornings to read, and two more weeks to make subsequent revisions as indicated in the markup.