The joy (and total confusion) of an easy edit

Stuffed with chocolate, regretful of said chocolate but determined to work, on Easter Monday, I started editing the four short stories I talked about (here). In that post, I mentioned that they went very well and I was happy with what I had written but was still expecting to have to edit them a fair bit ... well, I was (wonderfully! Gloriously! So very) wrong. I was giving myself until the end of April to finish them but how long did they actually take? Five days.

Here is a (sorta) chart of my progress:


DAY 1 - Monday 6th April 2015
Started (and finished) editing short story 1 @ 3,420 words (first draft 3,484 words)
Started editing short story 2
*It was a great first day of editing and so much fun! I was not expecting this at all - more of a me crying in the corner trying desperately to make sense of what I had written, kinda day.


DAY 2 - Tuesday 7th April 2015
Finished editing short story 2 @ 5,026 words (first draft 5,041 words)
Started (and finished) editing short story 3 @ 2,524 words (first draft 2,580 words)
*I have nothing different from yesterday to report. Just another brilliant day of editing.


DAY 3 - Wednesday 8th April 2015
Started (and finished) editing short story 4 @ 3,727 words (first draft 3,837 words)
I spent the rest of the day reading through all four short stories to make sure there were no errors or words I'd missed.
*Nothing dramatic happened today and the only emotion I felt was confusion that they didn't need much work.


DAY 4 - Thursday 9th April 2015
In the morning, I put the four short stories into one word document in the right order, made a table of contents etc then spent the rest of the day checking and double checking (yet again) the short stories for errors.

Later on in the evening, I helped my mum finish off the front cover and was extremely happy with how it turned out.

Arty shot of the (VERY) unfinished front cover.

DAY 5 - Friday 10th April 2015
I continued to check through the stories in a paranoia that I had made mistakes I hadn't seen and clocked in about three words per hour. I went slightly mad for most of the day.

In the afternoon on a break from the snail's pace checking, I ran over to my local library (THE SAVIOUR) and scanned the front cover then when I got home, continued to check SO SO SLOWLY for any errors. By dinner, I was nearly finished but about to have a meltdown.

When I had FINALLY finished checking the blasted thing, I got mum to look through it one last time and then I felt ON TOP OF THE WORLD! I am now a frazzled mess writing this blog post and tasks before bed tonight include: write the blurb for the book, add a thin black border to the front cover, convert word document into a html file, upload it all to Amazon KDP to publish it ready for the weekend!

Part of me is rather scared that I'll regret just self-publishing them without yet more editing but what's the point when I think they are ready now?

I have absolutely no idea how this happened. I really can't believe that they were in such a good state after the first draft ... I think I just got very lucky I suppose and will DEFINITELY not get used to this kind of thing.

Fingers crossed it will only take overnight to process and publish and of course, when it's ready, I will let you know about it, so expect another blog post on the morrow with all the details!

I hope you don't mind these little updates but selfishly, they are pretty great for me to look back on and see how far I have come in my writing journey.

Until next time.