What I’m Currently Reading

As of Wednesday, I reached the forty-three percent mark of The Pharaoh’s Secret by Clive Cussler and Graham Brown. At present, Kurt Austin and Joe are walking through a museum warehouse and have discovered some armed guards who are sweeping the warehouse looking for a mysterious Egyptian artefact. Kurt discovered something that was briefly mentioned in the prologue and discarded it in favour of moving on to find out why the bad guys where in the warehouse. I know I don’t usually share plot moments but, I’m a little too involved with the story at this point. In the latter half of the week, I didn’t get as much reading done due to my workload. But, I love the story, and I can’t wait to get back to reading.

Professional Beta-Reading

Last week I contacted Frostbite Publishing about their beta reading services on Tuesday and again on Thursday because I didn’t’ hear back. Nevertheless, I received confirmation that their company does Beta Read crime thrillers, and they have no problem reading a revised manuscript that is yet to be professionally edited. And, furthermore, I now have the next availability for the beta reader.

The next step in this process is to compile a list of questions to submit to the reader and book a slot in their calendar. On next weeks show, I will either share the list of questions or discuss the types of questions that I plan on asking the reader. There are a few points that I need feedback on in terms of the overall story and the reading experience. I’m a little worried that my story might be boring. To be honest, I never thought that I would feel that way because I loved writing the first draft. The story that excited me and at one point, I could wait to start writing. So, I guess I want to check that I didn’t over edit my story.

I’m now starting to see what I suspected all along, even though I’ve set deadlines I’m at the mercy of the calendars of the professionals that I want to hire. This was my original reasoning for not setting hard deadlines, but I changed my mind because I needed a little motivation. Deadlines are great but creating a professional product is more important.

Missing Revisions

Compared to the previous week, I didn’t do as much editing in terms of working hours. Last week I performed five hours of self-editing using AutoCrit• as a guide. I ran three reports, Showing vs Telling, Filler Words, and Passive Voice. The reports are an excellent guide because, without them, this stage of the editing process would feel overwhelming. It’s nice to have something that says “pay attention to these things.”

My focus was on excessive usage of telling, filler words, and passive voice. I didn’t want to delve too deeply into the passive voice rabbit hole because I honestly don’t know what I’m doing and I would rather have a professional line editor to tell me to fix certain things. To be honest line editing feels a little out of my depth like I’ve slept through medical school and I’m now doing an autopsy for the first time. And furthermore, you can have too much of a good thing especially when it comes to showing versus telling. Sometimes it’s okay to tell a reader something instead of showing them everything.

Two Great Reference Guides

During my revisions, I ended up turning to two books. The first is The Emotion Thesaurus. I used this as a reference guide for showing emotion instead of using words that tell how a character felt. As you’re probably aware, seeing a character express emotion is far better than using the phrase “he felt”, and it’s equivalents. I also turned to the book, Revision and Self-Editing by James Scott Bell during my revisions for the Showing versus Telling report. Chapter eight was filled with helpful examples of how to fix this problem in your manuscript. If you’re revising or just about to start revisions, I highly recommend you get your hands on that book.

Concluding Thoughts

So, that’s what I got up to last week. I’m hoping in the next Behind the Scenes Podcast Diary which will be episode 020, that I will have finished the self-editing phase for Missing, submitted the story to a professional Beta Reader, and started revisions for Silence. And, received a quote from my line-editor and hopefully some good news in regards to whether my manuscript is ready for editing.

Are you revising a story? I want to hear from you. Let me know in the comments section below by sharing your experience with revision.

Thanks for listening, and happy reading and writing, everybody.

Your coach, 

Amelia xx

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