Day 345: For me, editing is like pulling teeth
After I finished the 3rd book in my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series, I spent a couple days doing just business work—marketing and self-publishing stuff in preparation for the book release. This time, I sent the book to the editor for the multi-author box set, who is also one of the authors. She said she’d try to squeeze in my book before the deadline of May 30th and thinks it might be possible since I don’t need it until then. Hopefully she won’t come up with a bunch of structural issues that will need to be fixed, because the deadline for the manuscript is June 1st and I wouldn’t be able to make any major edits by then.
But I also don’t have any of the business work that I had with the Regency novel, since I’m not doing the self-publishing this time. There are pros and cons to this—with my own self-publishing, I can set my own deadlines and not have to worry if illness puts me behind schedule. After all, I had mental burnout for much of December last year, so that Lady Wynwood’s Spies book 3 took from early November until early February (a little over 3 months), even though the actual hours indicates that I could have finished it in two months if I hadn’t taken time off in December. It was rather stressful that since I had bad IBS and sinus headaches for much of March, it put me almost a month behind schedule in finishing this Hawaii book, which also ended up taking longer than expected since I was trying out a new writing style and struggling with adjusting to a new genre.
However, now I don’t have to worry about things like formatting the print book or the epub, just as I didn’t have to do anything for the cover design, and the other authors ended up writing the back cover copy in a Facebook conversation while I was offline and scrambling to finish the book, so I didn’t have to do that either. Plus the other authors are much more experienced when it comes to Facebook and Amazon ads, so I don’t have to do much more than throw money at them. We’re all doing various marketing strategies, and I’m contributing to the whole with my blogging and newsletters rather than shouldering all the marketing myself. I’m also learning a lot from them about the opportunities and outlets available for marketing and advertising that I hadn’t known about.
So today I did a bit of Japanese language study, and now I’m going to do some work on editing Lady Wynwood’s Spies book 1. I had blogged before about trying to do that as a Deep Work session to see if I can concentrate and focus on it without getting sloppy after a while. I noticed that my problem with the editing was that after a certain amount of time, I found myself skimming rather than really analyzing each sentence. I’m going to try a Deep Work session and hopefully I’ll be able to focus on it and maintain high quality editing work throughout.
***
I’m not entirely sure why, but I couldn’t do a Deep Work session on the editing of Lady Wynwood’s Spies 1. Maybe it’s because I’m still technically “resting” after finishing the Hawaii book and so I don’t want to do work? There is also the fact that the self-editing is just as painful as usual when I have to do it, even though in this case, the manuscript is quite clean and there isn’t much to change. Or is it that I don’t see much to change because I’m reluctant to be doing the self-editing at all and so I’m not paying attention to the rhythm of the sentences? Or maybe it’s because I discovered before that self-editing something already written was a lot harder than editing something as I was writing it?
Regardless, that was a rather fruitless hour. Since it was so unpleasant for me, it makes me think that I might be better off doing 5 or 10 minutes of self-editing during breaks rather than trying to do a Deep Work session. I think I would concentrate more if I knew it was only 10 minutes, or even 15 minutes.
It’s time to cook dinner, so I’ll get back to work afterward. I’m supposed to be resting, but I feel an urge to work on my fantasy serial novel, which is still like playing around for me (rather than like work) at this point. It’s like a great bit open canvas without much painted on it yet.
***
I did about an hour on my fantasy serial novel and I’m really enjoying it. I really hope I have the time to write this eventually.
I did a bunch of writing-related business today, as well as about an hour editing Lady Wynwood’s Spies book 1, but I don’t think I’ll record it here since it’s not that important a data metric. I’ll record my working time once I start work on the next Regency novel. I think now I’ll read a little and then try to go to bed early. I went to bed too late last night, although it was totally my own fault.
In the Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World book, he mentioned that you should unplug at a set time each day and not think about work for the rest of the night. However, when I did the last bit of work yesterday, I had started a monster in 4thewords.com. I wanted to finish the monster, so I did some work on the fantasy serial novel. But then I started getting more ideas and I ended up doing two monsters in 4thewords instead of finishing the one. So I never unplugged after I finished work, and I went to bed 2 hours later than I wanted.
So I need to make more of an effort to unplug at least a couple hours before bed so that I can go to bed on time.
My takeaway for today: Since self-editing Lady Wynwood’s Spies book 1 is so unpleasant for me, it might be better if I only do 10-15 minutes of self-editing during breaks rather than trying to do a longer session.
My second takeaway for today: I need to make more of an effort to unplug at least a couple hours before bed so that I can go to bed on time.
But I also don’t have any of the business work that I had with the Regency novel, since I’m not doing the self-publishing this time. There are pros and cons to this—with my own self-publishing, I can set my own deadlines and not have to worry if illness puts me behind schedule. After all, I had mental burnout for much of December last year, so that Lady Wynwood’s Spies book 3 took from early November until early February (a little over 3 months), even though the actual hours indicates that I could have finished it in two months if I hadn’t taken time off in December. It was rather stressful that since I had bad IBS and sinus headaches for much of March, it put me almost a month behind schedule in finishing this Hawaii book, which also ended up taking longer than expected since I was trying out a new writing style and struggling with adjusting to a new genre.
However, now I don’t have to worry about things like formatting the print book or the epub, just as I didn’t have to do anything for the cover design, and the other authors ended up writing the back cover copy in a Facebook conversation while I was offline and scrambling to finish the book, so I didn’t have to do that either. Plus the other authors are much more experienced when it comes to Facebook and Amazon ads, so I don’t have to do much more than throw money at them. We’re all doing various marketing strategies, and I’m contributing to the whole with my blogging and newsletters rather than shouldering all the marketing myself. I’m also learning a lot from them about the opportunities and outlets available for marketing and advertising that I hadn’t known about.
So today I did a bit of Japanese language study, and now I’m going to do some work on editing Lady Wynwood’s Spies book 1. I had blogged before about trying to do that as a Deep Work session to see if I can concentrate and focus on it without getting sloppy after a while. I noticed that my problem with the editing was that after a certain amount of time, I found myself skimming rather than really analyzing each sentence. I’m going to try a Deep Work session and hopefully I’ll be able to focus on it and maintain high quality editing work throughout.
***
I’m not entirely sure why, but I couldn’t do a Deep Work session on the editing of Lady Wynwood’s Spies 1. Maybe it’s because I’m still technically “resting” after finishing the Hawaii book and so I don’t want to do work? There is also the fact that the self-editing is just as painful as usual when I have to do it, even though in this case, the manuscript is quite clean and there isn’t much to change. Or is it that I don’t see much to change because I’m reluctant to be doing the self-editing at all and so I’m not paying attention to the rhythm of the sentences? Or maybe it’s because I discovered before that self-editing something already written was a lot harder than editing something as I was writing it?
Regardless, that was a rather fruitless hour. Since it was so unpleasant for me, it makes me think that I might be better off doing 5 or 10 minutes of self-editing during breaks rather than trying to do a Deep Work session. I think I would concentrate more if I knew it was only 10 minutes, or even 15 minutes.
It’s time to cook dinner, so I’ll get back to work afterward. I’m supposed to be resting, but I feel an urge to work on my fantasy serial novel, which is still like playing around for me (rather than like work) at this point. It’s like a great bit open canvas without much painted on it yet.
***
I did about an hour on my fantasy serial novel and I’m really enjoying it. I really hope I have the time to write this eventually.
I did a bunch of writing-related business today, as well as about an hour editing Lady Wynwood’s Spies book 1, but I don’t think I’ll record it here since it’s not that important a data metric. I’ll record my working time once I start work on the next Regency novel. I think now I’ll read a little and then try to go to bed early. I went to bed too late last night, although it was totally my own fault.
In the Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World book, he mentioned that you should unplug at a set time each day and not think about work for the rest of the night. However, when I did the last bit of work yesterday, I had started a monster in 4thewords.com. I wanted to finish the monster, so I did some work on the fantasy serial novel. But then I started getting more ideas and I ended up doing two monsters in 4thewords instead of finishing the one. So I never unplugged after I finished work, and I went to bed 2 hours later than I wanted.
So I need to make more of an effort to unplug at least a couple hours before bed so that I can go to bed on time.
My takeaway for today: Since self-editing Lady Wynwood’s Spies book 1 is so unpleasant for me, it might be better if I only do 10-15 minutes of self-editing during breaks rather than trying to do a longer session.
My second takeaway for today: I need to make more of an effort to unplug at least a couple hours before bed so that I can go to bed on time.
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