Image: Source unknown.
Happy Easter! He is risen!
I know I haven’t posted much lately, but as this has been Holy Week, and I’m Catholic, I’ve been quite busy. I’m also finishing up Dead to Rites, and I’m in the oh-my-gosh-I-have-to-get-this-thing-out-of-the-house-I’m-so-sick-of-it phase of the writing process. I tend to hit a period of malaise and despondency as I’m finishing a project, but this one has gone more smoothly than the last. Although crafting the final chapters was like pulling teeth, my editor only asked for minor alterations, and I was able to move forward on her requests without the lengthy period of blockage I had with the first novel.
I just finished the grueling and monotonous task of running the book through a spelling and grammar checker. I didn’t do this with Jake and the Dynamo; since I use so many made-up or foreign words, and since I write complex sentences the average grammar checker can’t handle—as well as a slew of sentence fragments in dialogue—I’ve inadvertently trained myself not to see the red and green underlining. I was subsequently embarrassed to find typos in the final draft of my first novel that a spellcheck could have caught, though the book had seen an editor and proofreader even after I had edited it extensively.
With this in mind, I put Dead to Rites through the checker, and it was as agonizing a process as I had envisioned, but it also caught several typos I might have easily missed while proofreading, mostly in the form of missing letters in some of the more exotic names. It also highlighted idiosyncrasies of my writing style, especially my bad habit of starting sentences with and, so this will give me opportunity to vary my sentence structure more as I make the final edits.
Only two steps are left in my editing process: I am going to do my customary search and replace for common grammatical errors, and then I am going to print the whole thing and read it through with a red pen to find any mistakes, overused words, or loose sentences I missed while reading on the screen. After that, it’s off to the publisher to go through a professional proofread before it sees print.
My editor wants a couple of characters’ motivations clarified. I’m still figuring out how to do that, but I don’t think it will require more than a few sentences, and I’ll determine where to insert those as I’m doing the read-through of the hard copy.
I mentioned before that my next project was Son of Hel, an action novel about Santa Claus and Krampus. I’ve realized, as I’ve begun working on Son of Hel, that it will require considerable research to do it justice since I want to combine together all the Christmas folklore I can find. But I also want to publish two novels this year, so I think my next book out will actually be Rag & Muffin, which is already complete in rough draft form.
