Editing, am at a loss.

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Written by: on Saturday, January 19th, 2013

I decided for the year of 2013 that I’d try to spend time editing and revising one of my manuscripts that I hammered out for NaNoWriMo. I decided to focus on my first attempt from 2010 because at least I did my best to smooth it out so that the story flowed from beginning to end.

So I dug out Caspar and the Lunar Magic and pretty much… did nothing. Well, I guess technically I did some writing. I wrote down a quick summary of each chapter in my notebook so that I could quickly glance and know where I am at. I’m still dealing with such a huge manuscript. Scrivener has been suggested to me several times so I downloaded that and gave it a whirl. I felt that it complicated things. Or maybe not. I don’t know.

I just don’t know how to edit it. I don’t know how to add to it. This is terribly frustrating for me because how can I write a manuscript and not know how to polish it into a story that I’d be proud of? Maybe it’s a skill I just lack. I don’t know. We’re almost three weeks in and I still haven’t written or changed a scene in the book. I’ve been searching around, reading blog entries, watching youtube videos, trying to figure out something that would help me take the manuscript aside and go, “Ah-ha! I think I know how to start working on this thing now.”

Books I’ve read since:
Night Mare by Piers Anthony

I ordered Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke. I’m about halfway through that. Then on Christmas day I was given a Kindle Fire HD. I looked into ebooks there and am a bit surprised that a lot of kindle versions of books are either more expensive or almost the same price as a physical copy of the book. I feel more compelled to buy the cheap-o paperback version instead of shelling out a good chunk of money for a digital version that might just up and disappear if something happened to my kindle. So far I’ve downloaded a handful of free classic books. I’m about halfway through on Allan Quatermain by H. Rider Haggard. The one thing I’ve noticed about the Kindle Fire HD is that it is very difficult to read on it. I have turned down the brightness but still… I feel more compelled to use it as a tablet – playing on apps or surfing the web instead of actually sitting down to read anything on it. Still, it’s a pretty nifty thing to have.

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