On Writing & Storytelling: Looks Like Today is Editing & Revising Day!

Afternoon, Friday, August 11, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, Dear Reader. I’m off to a distressingly late start to the last working day of the week. I didn’t sleep late; I woke up between 6:30 and 7:30 in the morning, and I usually publish my daily WordPress blog around noon. But I went to bed later than usual – insomnia struck again, it seems – so when I got up within my “usual wakeup window” I was unusually tired and unmotivated. I didn’t even want to go to the kitchen to make coffee until after 10:30 AM, that’s how run down I felt.

Well, I feel better now after a late brunch of stuffed crust pizza and coffee, and I will work on Reunion: Coda today. I don’t think I will write new material – sorry, Chapter 11, Scene Two! – but I will do some badly-needed revisions to the manuscript, especially in the most recent material I added to it. As it stands, although I’m willing to put in the time to work on the novel, my energy levels are much lower than I like (or need) to be creative and have fun while writing.

At least those revisions I will make on Reunion: Coda will reduce – I can’t say “prevent” because I am not clairvoyant or 100% certain of my abilities to copy edit the entire manuscript – the number of post-publication “fixes” to the finished novel. I wish now that I’d been a bit less eager to publish the first half of the Reunion duology and spent more time editing and revising the novella before I rushed through the production process of Reunion: A Story.  

While I’m on the topic of Reunion: A Story and the many times I’ve had to send revisions to Kindle Direct Publishing, I’m happy to report that the last batch of fixes went through the KDP pipeline and are now applied to both the Kindle and the paperback editions of Book 1 of the Reunion Duology. I checked my Kindle Fire tablet and my PC’s Kindle app, and, sure enough, Juilliard is spelled correctly, and any other minor fixes that I made last week have been integrated into the two editions. (Of course, the only thing that Kindle readers need to do is make sure that they have turned on the “automatic updates” option.)

Paperback edition readers – including me – will either need to buy the latest (post-August 8) edition or simply ignore the small errors that are still in the July 2023 edition.

I wish – again – that I’d been in less of a rush to publish Reunion: A Story and had done a better job of editing it during the pre-publication stages of production. It might not have resulted in a “perfect” first edition, but I might have been happier with it, and I wouldn’t have needed to take time out from writing its sequel to fix typos, misspellings, and mismatches of dates and events in the text.

I did, however, learn my lesson, so that’s why I am making more of an effort to edit and revise Reunion: Coda and give the reader the best story experience possible.

I’m going to take my usual rest break at a most unusual time, then I’ll get down to the business of copy editing the latest material in Reunion: Coda. So, until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.