Every writer understands the importance of editing their work.  It has been edited, either by an editor, or by a group of beta readers, and now its time to sit down and wade through all the comments and markings on the page.  It’s a slow process going through it page by page making sure the story becomes more refined as you go.  Some writers are able to plow through it and get the editing done pretty quickly forgoing all other projects until their story has been edited.  Other writers aren’t able to set aside other projects and focus on editing.

The question is how do you find that balance?

Every writer has their own process for editing.  Just like writing it is a time consuming task, one that requires a greater attention to detail.  The details are more than just what you’ve got written down on the page though.  This time it’s also all the comments and remarks you’ve received on your manuscript and now you have to translate that into your work.  Sometimes it is a simple fix, be it a deletion of a few words or sentences, or it can be a complex solution that requires rewriting entire sections of a chapter.

If you’re editing begins to leave you feeling drained, like you’re coming up for air or you feel like your burning out, chances are you need to make a change.  Look at how much time you spend on editing.  Is it all in one block, or broken up?  Are there other projects you could work on to break up the time spent editing?  Just like writing, sometimes its good to step back a bit during the editing process and allow it to simmer.  That doesn’t mean editing a page and then coming back the next day to look at it again before proceeding to the next.  Maybe its a matter of doing a few pages at a time, and depending on how extensive the edits are, stop for the day and come back the next and pick up where you left off, checking the last couple edits to make sure you’re not missing anything.

When I first began editing my DEMON HUNTER manuscript, I spent my lunch hour at work, and my evenings at home editing.  This meant I was spending anywhere from two to five hours editing a day.  After a while I started to dread grabbing my laptop at night.  When a few weeks of this passed, I thought about why I was dreading my nightly editing.  It turned out that while I knew I had to edit, I couldn’t focus solely on editing my manuscript.  I was burning out and fast.  I had edited the first five chapters in a week, and granted some were short chapters several of those pages had a lot of comments on them that made the page look blacker than it really was when glancing at it.  I needed to balance my editing with writing.  What I came up with was a loose schedule that allowed me to edit, and still write.

Because of my job I can usually predict my schedule and looked at how I could edit and write.  I found that while at work I was able to focus more on editing and get a fair amount of work done on my lunch break.  I decided then that I would continue that regimen because it worked.  That left me with my evenings.  I knew I had several other projects I wanted to work on.  I had TEMPTING FATE to revise and prep for submission to publishers.  I also had another short story I had yet to finish along with my second book I wanted to start and a few more stories featuring my Druid I had written about in TEMPTING FATE.

So I decided that my evenings would entail writing. Having revised TEMPTING FATE, I needed to decide what to focus on next.  I had a short story I had started a year ago but never finished, and I had some of my friends suggest that I start on the second book in my series.  I thought about it and initially started plotting out my second book, but as my editing progressed I realized I couldn’t really start book two until I had book one edited at least once.  So I opted to revisit and finish my other short story.

I recently finished that story, which is currently titled CHAMPION OF ATLANTIS. That leaves me to decide what to do next.  I’ve got a list of short stories featuring Roland, and while I can’t wait to write them, I get an hour (sometimes more) with him five to six days a week.  I’ve decided that while Roland gets my days, Isaiah, my Druid, gets my evenings until DEMON HUNTER is completed.  Then I get to delve into my second Demon Hunter book and figure out how I want to balance my time between my two characters.