Fix your face.

Last week I received my first 50 pages of edits from Inspired Quill. It was a really enjoyable experience. Reading through my work after it had been through the editing process was quite weird but super-funky at the same time. They sent it with a mixture of blue and red text. Blue text is mainly comments and suggestions, while red text is ‘Change this’. Almost all of the red text covers typos, odd grammar mistakes and incredible tense errors. A few of them had me wincing. ‘How the hell did I miss that!?’

There were a few editorial observations which have really helped already. It was pointed out I use a lot of ‘He/She’ at the start of sentences. While it made me giggle a little shamefully – mainly because there’s another 190 pages of that particular fault to come for Sara as she goes through the manuscript – it also made the problem quite clear. As a result my future writing will keep an eye out for overuse of such simple language terms. Also I tend to repeat words quite a lot. Some of it is stylistic, but occasionally I get carried away. Obviously this is a second draft thing, but I’ll certainly be looking with a more critical eye over my future drafts for five uses of the word ‘Bounced’ in a single paragraph.

There was also some positive stuff throw in, along with chapter summaries. Sara has been very kind with her feedback so far. One of her comments about the protagonist, Sarene, really had me smiling. It’s quite a kick to be told by your publisher that a character is a favourite. In addition the small dashes of humour I throw into my work seem to be well received. I can’t wait for the rest of the edited manuscript to come back to me. Here’s hoping that she still enjoys it when the vampires and werewolves turn up in alien spacecraft halfway through the book.

-grins-

A recent conversation with @madeleinecook on Twitter gave me a bit of inspiration for this blog. Y’see, a lot of times when we communicate with others through text it’s hard to pick up how something is written. Sarcasm is a tricky one. While you hear a wry tone of voice when you type it, the person who reads it may hear deadpan, straight-forward delivery. Smileys help – a pokey-out tongue here and a wink there cuts a lot of the bite out of potentially hard words – but what if you don’t tack one on? (I smiley the hell out of my Facebook and Twitter posts, and it sometimes annoys me. Surely it just detracts from the words themselves?)

I guess the better you know a person the easier it is to work out their intentions. An odd example is when I send applications and cover letters to jobs. Yep, I’m job-hunting at the moment. Anyway, when I write those emails out to prospective employers, the words on the screen sound a little soulless and forced. You can’t inflect them with wit or charisma. You can’t build a rapport anywhere near as well as you can with a phone conversation or face-to-face meeting. You certainly can’t add a fucking smiley. While it’s now easier to communicate with others than it has ever been, the communication has changed. Words are plentiful but charm is lacking in its place. In my opinion anyway. But then, I’m one of those stuck-up arseholes who thinks textspeak will be the death of the English language, so you can’t really trust what I say too much.

In other news: I’m still in Essex for the time being. It’s been a bit quiet over here. Had one incredibly messy session with a few old friends in Romford last week, which was ace. Next week a lot of my buddies here in Grays will be taking various breaks from work so will be looking to be out and about a bit. I’ve picked up my workrate during my break from Norway, so the other two WIP I have at the moment are ticking along nicely. However that may all change when the new Star Wars MMO is released next week. I’m going to have to be pretty strict about doing my daily work before logging on. I might even get my brother to set up a parental control on my internet, arf.

Please feel free to add comments or thoughts below, and remember to follow my Facebook page (ick) and my Twitter account. Cheers.