Editing Trails

It’s been a busy October for me, but that happens. And that’s good, but sometimes I need to remember the quote I once read about being busy from Henry David Thoreau. “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”

Ants are certainly forever busy, but they do get what ants need done done. They know what they are busy about. We need to know the same as we rush here to fro, from one task to another. Sometimes at the end of the day, I’m not always sure what I’ve been busy about. But this week I know. I’ve been busy editing my next year’s release, The Song of Sourwood Mountain. Watch for my cover release on Sunday. I hope you’ll like it.

But back to the busyness. I don’t edit with ink or pencil on typed manuscripts anymore, but I used to before I came into the word processing world. This is actually a page I edited for my middle reader story, Discovery at Coyote Point,  published many years ago. It was one of my favorite young people books and I got letters from kids all over who liked the story. Some teachers read the story aloud to their classes. That was so nice to think about. But before it got to a reading teacher’s hands, I worked to make the words of the story the best that I could by editing. I used to take this page with me when I talked to students at schools. I wanted them to realize that what comes out of your head first might not be the best, but you can always try to make it better.

Nowadays, I do my editing on my computer. So, I don’t have the paper trail of corrections that I used to have.  Sometimes that’s not good when you decide the first way of writing a scene was the best way after all. I don’t have that worry on these galley edits I’m working on now since every change is tracked. So the computer screen of the pages with corrections looks something the same as the paper up at the top. It’s the edits I do on my book before it goes to the publishers for the first time that have the disappearing edits. I could track my changes then, but I don’t. I just fix what I think needs fixing and rewrite and add or delete scenes to tell the story the best way I can. Here’s a snippet of the editing I’m doing now just for a comparison.

In the process of trying to find this bit of editing, I discovered I have been editing on two different files. That’s not good and means part of my edits don’t show on the most recent file I’ve been working on. I’m trying not to panic. The good thing is I do have all the edits. The bad thing is I can’t merge the two documents without losing the editing trail.

But it’s late. This is going to have to be a problem for another day. It could be worse. I think. No, I know it could be worse. I could not have all the edits that I’ve done if I had done away with one of the documents. It will just mean some extra work. I’ll just have to be like the ants and keep busy to get it done.

Have you ever thought about how many times an author edits her stories?