Monday 3 August 2015

The new book is almost there - editing commences!

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The new book is almost there
It's taken far longer than I thought possible, with extra work commitments and ending up doing a lot more mystery shopping than I thought I'd do, but the second boom is almost complete. Large parts of it have actually been written in the same way I'm writing this - on the park and ride bus on the way to work. I have chapter after chapter saved and stores in different devices and I'm really pleased with the first draft. All that remains is reading through it, editing the text to ensure it flows and makes some sort of sense. I say all that remains, but I know from the experience of writing the first book that this can take some time. The first book was edited up from a series of blogs, so the content was really written without me really noticing the amount of time it took. I then had to re-read, edit and make it sound like a book with chapters, rather than a blog with entries. The cross-references had to work and I wanted to break up the text with blocks of colour.

As I've said in a recent blog, this has been re-edited again, adding a chapter, rewriting parts of other chapters and adding photographs and a newly-designed cover-

http://245daystogo.blogspot.com/2015/07/photographs-reviews-fiverr-and-some.html

I want to go through this process in the first instance with my second book. I want to edit it thoroughly and launch it on the Amazon Kindle store in it's finalised form, to make the most of the reviews and sales. After this is launched, the next step will be to write a link between the two books to ensure that they flow and then publish this as a double book. The idea is that you can get the content from both books as a double book for less than the price of buying each book individually.

Hopefully this will all get finished before a near-three-week holiday starting soon, and I'm hoping that the writing creativity continues to flow. I'm thinking about/hoping that I can get another book written during this holiday. It will be a fiction book that describes the beautiful landscape of where I'm going on holiday mixed with thoughts and feelings about certain aspects of my life so far. I'm inspired by the inner monologue of the writings of Phillip Roth and I want to tap into feelings I have the echo and come to the forefront when reading Mickey Sabbath or Swede Levov in Roth's writing. Obviously I'm not comparing myself to Roth or trying to be a Roth-lite but I find the writing crisp, energetic and witty. I hope to capture at least the first two in my writing, but I'm very aware that this will be quite a slow process and the drafting, redrafting and editing process is something I expect to take up a lot of my spare time. I'll look to self-publish it again, but the main idea behind it is a sort of line-in-the-sand moment where I can move on to other things. It's quite personal, and I'll get my wife to read the drafts first and help me with the content editing process. The writing and rewriting will all come down to me, though.

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