Content Edits

Reader, let me tell you, I don’t think I’ve been more aware of my personal writing style than I was when Kim and I got our first round of content edits back on book 1 of the Amber Falls Series: Yours, Always. Little quirks, odd phrasing, repeating words and a myriad of other strange things present themselves when a real editor reviews your manuscript for the first time.

Listen. We’re not professionals. We started this as a lark—to spend time together. That being said, both Kim and I are well educated and well read. We know the difference between their, they’re and there. We know where to put dialogue tags and punctuation. But I don’t know what a subjunctive clause is. I’ve looked it up, been told what it is by our editor and I still don’t know what a subjunctive clause is (sorry, Nicki!).

We read through our manuscript so many times, edited chapters—we even read the whole thing out loud! We thought we knew what editing was. I believe at one point we may have confidently declared “If we self-published this today I’d be okay with it!” Oh, how wrong we were. This is just a few of the things we missed: *character names spelled wrong *timeline issues *finding things we want to ADD(??) during content editing. I can get into this more when we write about crafting a series. It's a lot of pressure to know that once this is published you can't just go in and change things. What happens in Amber Falls stays in Amber Falls.

This is all after over a year of writing and at least 50 times reading through the whole book.

I notice that I like to head-hop. There isn’t a POV I don’t like. If I want a character to think something, even though the scene is not in their perspective, I just throw it in. I guess that’s frowned upon. I didn’t even notice it, or it didn’t occur to me that going from one character’s thoughts to another without a clear change of scene mattered.

 I don’t write in contractions. Strange, right? When writing I will always type out I will rather than I’ll…Oh, I see what I did there. It’s strange to go through a chapter I’ve written to see contractions written out when that’s not how it would be spoken.

There’s so much more, like the overuse of adverbs, that went unnoticed in our readings though the manuscript. We’re grateful to our editor, Nicki, who took two unprofessional writers and made them just a little bit better. And we promise we’ll use all this wisdom going into book 2.

For now, you can pre-order book 1! It is due out September 26th, 2023 Amazon Totally Bound

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