Last night I realized there may be some hope for me as a writer. I was on page 222 of my editing (out of 302), and it suddenly occurred to me that my editing was going way faster than before. I took a moment to think about why, and noticed I was not doing as many passive-voice to active-voice changes. Perhaps the reason for the almost imperceptible difference was the “timing” of the writing I was currently looking at. These pages were written in 2008.

Interesting. In the first few months of 2008, I was reading books like a crazed lunatic. Do crazed lunatics read? I’ll have to think about that some more. Anyway, as I said in a previous post, it took me five years to complete the work. It seems to me that my writing style suddenly improved around the beginning of the year. I am now convinced that good reading habits help to develop one’s writing.

I want to thank Danyelle Ferguson ( http://www.fergusonauthors.com ) for getting me off to a good start in my editing. She took the first three chapters of the book and made oodles of suggestions . . . everything from the typical grammar and punctuation stuff, to voice, characterization, plot, and flow. I was very pleased with her comments and ideas for improvement. She did cause me a lot of work though! Wait a minute . . . I caused the extra work. I wrote it. Should have done it right the first time!

I hope to have the rest of the pages edited by the beginning of the week. Then the manuscript will be sent to Danyelle for a full edit. After she causes me a bunch more work, Off to the publisher(s) it goes!

Thanks Danyelle! This is so exciting!