Editing the Apocalypse Blog
Over the past month, I took a hiatus from writing Starwalker and turned my attention to editing the Apocalypse Blog instead. The past four weeks have been focussed on getting the remainder of the adventure ready to be released as ebooks.
It was long overdue. I had hoped to chip away at the task while I wrote the current web serial. I had hoped to release books 2 and 3 months ago. Like many good intentions lately, that just didn’t happen. Sometimes, keeping up with Starwalker was enough to keep me run off my feet! And then a new project reared its head and demanded to be written…
When it came to editing it, I found it was difficult to do it piecemeal. I may have written it that way, but when I think about putting the story into ebooks, a more consolidated view helped greatly.
It was the first time I had read the story through, end to end. There was never any time when I was writing it – I had to stay focussed on what was happening in the story at that moment – and when it was finished, I needed to put it down for a while and step back. By the time I was ready to look at it again, I was already hip-deep in the next project and time was, once again, an issue.
An inter-book hiatus in Starwalker was, therefore, the perfect time to get some editing done. I put all my current projects on hold and devoted the entire month to editing. It wasn’t much of a rest (whoops!) but the change was refreshing.
My intention with converting the Apocalypse Blog into ebooks was to tidy it up and release it largely as it stands. No big restructures or reworking of the plot. No big changes. Just a quick edit and proof, and then release it into the wild.
If I’m honest, I was nervous about what I would find in editing. Writing it the way I did – writing, editing, and posting every day, and moving immediately on to the next post – was frenetic and fun, but there wasn’t a lot of scope for fact-checking. Self-editing is always tricky, especially when it’s so hard on the heels of the writing. I couldn’t help but wonder if the Apocalypse Blog was full of errors, inconsistencies, repetition, and lazy writing.
On the whole, I’m pleased to say that my fears were unfounded. It wasn’t perfect, but minor typos aside, there weren’t any big problems. It seems that my self-editing isn’t as bad as it could have been.
Which isn’t to say that I didn’t change things. Some of the negative feedback I received about the Apocalypse Blog was that there wasn’t enough ‘showing’, and there were places where I had glossed over or summarised events rather than writing them out. Part of it was efficiency, and part of it was focus: there sometimes just wasn’t time or space to do everything! However, these were easy to fix up in editing, where I can spend the time to fill it out and I’m not constrained by limited post lengths.
Preparing it for ebook release also allowed me to combine multiple posts, where an event was split over several days’ posts due to the sheer size of it. That was tricky in itself; in the third book in particular, a couple of sequences of posts had to be completely reorganised, and I wound up with a couple of gaps that I had to write new posts for.
So, there’s a lot of new material going into the ebooks. Many posts have been expanded and there’s a couple of whole new ones. I lost count of how many words were being added, but it’s probably over 10,000 words bigger than it used to be. Phew! No wonder it took me a month to edit it all.
Books 2 and 3 are currently in proofing (I have a lovely beta-reader helping me out with that, for all the mistakes that I can’t see myself). The covers are ready to go (many thanks to Beth for her fast work on those!). I should be able to release the rest of the Apocalypse Blog over the next couple of weeks!
In the meantime, Starwalker is back. Time to get my tail in gear and focus on that again!
Comments are closed!