Hi gang! Well I just hopefully finished my final edits on Chapter 67. My editor now has all my final chapters and is going through them as she can get to them. Sometimes in batches, sometimes one chapter at a time. I am still very thankful for all her contributions and help along the way. This has been a long road and she could have pulled out at any time, but it is nice to see she wants to see this through almost as much as I. Still a major WIP (Work in progress), but we are getting there!
I just received Chapter 67 from her the other day, and today on my "author day" as I call my Monday's, I was finally able to review. As usual, despite now looking for it, I had several POV (Point of View) issues. I have a bad habit of jumping from one person's perspective to another as I write, and I rarely notice it myself, even in re-reads. My find just fills in the blanks I guess or knows who's speaking, but to most readers it might cause them to get lost along the way or confused. Luckily my editor always catches those and points them out to me for me to remove or rewrite those sections. Now a few times I felt the POV change was necessary for the story, so she showed me how to designate the change professionally. In the future I will need to get better with POV issues, or otherwise just get better and these designations for POV changes. I have read some author's books where there are several POV changes in just one chapter and it reads fine. So I guess it comes down to how good you are in your writing so that the reader can follow those changes.
These last chapters are now my climax thriller ending, which are so crucial like everything else to get it right. I feel its a nail bitter ending in my brain, so of course I hope the reader thinks that too. I have only had two people fully read my entire manuscript. Some people say they would like too, but then you send them a 100 pages only to never get a response back from them or any kind of review. Frustrating, but I think people are sometimes just being nice when they say they would like to read it and either find out its not their type of read, or really just aren't the type to read much, or don't have the time to truly do so. I have been very picky along the way, only letting two people actually read the whole novel, now I have had about a half dozen read the first 100 pages, and got lots of good feedback from those reads, a couple were professional beta readers, the rest just family or friends. The biggest thing I got out of all the comments if you look at them as a whole, is its an easy read, and one that keeps you turning the pages wanting to know what happens next. So I am good with that!
My critique partners from my local group have also been a big help, but I do find when you have a half dozen or more critiquers that everybody has a different opinion, and sometimes they may not align with your own vision because they don't write like yourself or even write in your genre. So I always just take it all in, read all the notes, and put together my own changes that I see fitting. It was painful when I first started out and getting my pages ripped on, but that was also a learning curve I needed to go through. My original early drafts did actually sucked, and I just didn't see it like many new writers. I thought it was great. Several in my critique group are new or returning indie authors who have already self-published, some are short story writers, some were even poets. All interesting perspectives. I miss meeting up with my different groups, and now have been correesponding with a couple of them online like all writers are probably doing right now during this pandemic. You do what you have to do.
Soon I will have to do a complete reread of my novel (as well as my editor) when we are done doing our current line editing of all the chapters. That will be a big job too, because it is then where you realize you may need to remove a section, or chapter in full because it goes off on a tanget, or confuses the readers. That will be hard to do especially when you might like the section, and what it contains, but just isn't needed. Like a movie being edited it must be done. I will probably be sending out my whole manuscript to another editor I have found so that I have a fresh perspective from a different point of view that myself and my current editor who have been engrained in this stories creation for so long now. Sometimes hard to be objective.
Getting closer ever day!