A many-coloured thing

When editing, I use a few references, some old, some new:

The first is Patricia Holt's Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do).This is an absolute must for editing and I use ninety-percent of the time. The article is clear and informative, with examples so readers can see why a sentence is wrong or ill-considered.


The second is Holly Lisle's free e-book, Mugging the Muse. This book never goes out of fashion. It's full of articles detailing the road to publication.

Number three: Elizabeth Sim's 8 Ways to Write a 5-star Chapter One. I suck at first chapters - probably the first three chapters - until I get into the meat of the piece.I think it's the rush to get to the good bits, the manic writing to set the scene. Info-dumps used to be my starting point; now, I hope, not so much.


Finally, Chuck Sambuchino's Ten Tips for Building Your Writing Checklist which gives me more to be thinking of as I wade through the text.

I'm going through Ms Holt's article, which means my current WIP, Huntress: Alone, is now a many-coloured thing as I highlight bad words, or suffixes like 'ly' or 'ness', and the 'to be' words, like 'was', 'were', 'am', 'be', 'been', 'being' etc. Each category has a different colour. Every time I do this, I think I'm improving - and then I see how many words were replaced with lurid colour. Of course, I have to go back and change things because the heroine, Cambria, has 'am' in the middle of it!


It mean I have to pay closer attention to what I'm doing, otherwise, when I post the book, it will have that added colour to some pages. Once I'm done, I get to use grammar references... oh... joy.