THE EDITING JOURNEY , CONGRATS, & MANUSCRIPT FORMATTING

This time around, my post will touch on a varied subject list that are all related more or less.

Firstly, my current sojourn in the publishing world, editing. I received the first edited installment of my novel, "Winter's Captive" from my publisher. Having waited four  months for the editing process to begin, my mind has worked overtime, leaving me with a fearful dread as to what to expect. Silly me!

Of course, I can't say what it was like in the old days with hand-written copies, or blue-pencilled typewritten pages. But the magic world of computers has made the whole process so much easier and less time-consuming for the author to correct.  If you use a word program, a simple box in the "Review" menu called "Track Changes" makes the editing life a whole lot easier. There are other boxes that add to this process as well. The "Reviewing Pane" shows you how many corrections the editor is suggesting and how many comments she has written in the margins. The "Accept" or "Reject" boxes are all part of your tools. If you accept the change, just click the appropriate box. The computer automatically makes the change and the correction count automatically lowers in the "Reviewing Pane". It works the same way if you reject the change. You can also delete comments in the margins once you have dealt with that option. By the time you are finished the counts should be at zero.

I LOVE THIS FEATURE.

So how many corrections did I have? Not telling, but enough that I'm so grateful that all I had to do was "click" my way to perfection LOL.

Secondly, congratulations to Tiffany Cannon. Tiffany is a fellow critter from my writing group who entered the Amazon Breaththrough Novel Contest. She progressed in a contest of 5000 manuscripts to top 250. Okay, so her journey stopped there. She lost out in the top 50. But she is still a winner, as she has two agents wishing to represent her. As I type this, she probably has chosen which agent she will go with. Sometime in the not too long future, I'm sure we will see her book, "Keeper" on bookshelves.

Thirdly, manuscript formatting. While avigating my way around Tiffany's blog site, http://tiffanyc7.blogspot.com/2011/04/end-of-road-for-abna-contest.html I came across a blog where she  discussed manuscript formatting. Since my natterings today are about editing formats, I thought I would add a link Tiffany used on her site.  I learned some things I didn't know about manuscript formatting in regards to ebooks and Kindle formats. Vickie Motter is an agent for Andrea Hurst Literary Management. Here is the link to her blog site, "Navigating the Slush Pile". If you go to her April archives, you will find her post on manucript formatting. http://navigatingtheslushpile.blogspot.com/

Have a great writing week and keep on keeping on writing.