Saturday 21 March 2015

Self Edit Tips - Stephanie Dagg

Editing - you either love it or hate it. As a freelance editor who's now clocked up twenty-five years in the publishing profession, clearly I love it. However, I know a lot of authors dread the E word. For our purposes editing is the preparation of written materials for publication or presentation by correcting, revising or adapting. When you do this yourself, it's self-editing. Whether you can ever self-edit adequately is a matter for debate. Generally you can't. You are too familiar with your own work and the human eye is a devious thing. It will swear blind to your brain that you've written what you were trying to say and not notice a missing word or a spelling mistake. How much editing should you do before you either hand your project over to a professional editor for a final polish or launch it directly into the market yourself? You should read your work through at least twice and tidy up as you do so. But not much more than that. I cringe when I come across authors saying they are on their sixth or seventh revision. That's way too many. By that stage you're only tinkering and obsessing. Stop. Let your baby go.
Stepahie Jane Dagg
As an editor, I take as much care of your book 'baby' as I do of every llama baby that arrives on our farm!
 As an editor, I take as much care of your book 'baby' as I do of every llama baby that arrives on our farm! OR It can be hard to let your baby go!

So, to help with the editing process and make it as efficient as possible, here are a few tips on self-editing. 1. Spot your overused words and weed them out: we all have some that become our default words and we shove them in without really thinking. The usual culprits I've found over the years are these: just, a bit, however, though, a little, of course, in fact, said, stood, walked, nevertheless, nonetheless, seeing as, almost, really, surely, certainly, some, could only, suddenly, nice, lovely, immediately, rather, well, very, decided. But how can you discover your own foibles? Select a passage of a current piece of your writing, say at least 1,000 words. Copy it and paste it to create a new document. Starting with the list of words above, now do a 'find' for each one of them, and note down how often it appears. Add other words that you know you're prone to employing. Any of these words or phrases that are cropping up more than 5 times definitely need your attention, and any with 3 or 4 appearances could do with thinking about too. Replace them with a synonym or get rid of them altogether. Now critically read the new version and I'm sure you'll see an improvement. 2. Names: keep a list of character names. And keep them as varied as you can. There are thousands upon thousands of names to choose from but it's astonishing how many authors duplicate names or end up with a selection that are all very similar to each other - for example Jane, Joan, Jean, Joanne, Janet all appearing in one book. (There's a definite bias towards names beginning with J I've noticed too!) There's a very handy character name generator on my website here http://edit-my-book.com/name-generator.html to help you come up with a name if you're stuck. Hugely successful indie author Kristen Ashley has quite a line in making up unusual names for her characters. If it works for her, then why not give it a shot too. Be inventive. 3. Style sheet: as with the list of names, you should keep one of these. A style sheet is where you jot down how you present your work. Will you use double quotation marks around speech (recommended) or single ones? Where will you use hyphenation? Will you capitalise certain nouns that aren't proper nouns to give them extra emphasis in your story? And so on. The idea of the style sheet is to ensure consistency in your work. It's not too late to compile one during your last read through. 4. Back to front and a different format: on your final proofread, work from the back, a page at a time. This gives you a whole new perspective on your story from seeing it in a very different way. This will make it easier to spot typos. You should also read your story through either printed out or on an ereader. Again, the different appearance of your MS from how you've usually seen it on the computer screen will help you spot mistakes more easily. 5. Don't rush: take some time over your self-editing. Take plenty of breaks and even put the work aside for a few days before a final proofread. Mark Coker of Smashwords has said that one of the main mistakes indie authors make is being too impatient to publish. This will mean grumpy reviews that stick if there are silly grammatical or spelling mistakes, or a plot that was too hastily cobbled together and not thought through. Don't spoil the ship for a ha'porth of tar. Fools rush in. More haste, less speed. There are plenty of age-old sayings advising against impetuosity and they hold true in this era of epublishing where the temptation is to throw ourselves into the digital stream as quickly as possible. You've put a lot of time and effort into your writing, so don't let yourself down by skimping on the last stages of production. Spend time on self-editing and editing and produce something that's as professional as you can make it. Your writing is worth it. Stepanie Jane Dagg

Sunday 15 March 2015

Blog Tour - Storm in the Valley - Lee Passarella







Title: Storm in the Valley
Author: Lee Passarella
Genre: Historical Civil War Fiction
Length: 134 pages
Release Date: February 25, 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1508414209

SYNOPSIS: Townsend Philips, a.k.a. Monk Phillips, has soldiering in his blood: his Uncle Lucas, who raised him, was a colonel in the Mexican-American War, and Monk’s older brother John Tyler is a cadet at the famed Virginia Military Institute. With his uncle’s blessing, in the summer of 1861 12-year-old Monk enlists as drummer boy with the 51st Virginia Volunteer Regiment.

Throughout the war, the Phillips brothers despair of ever seeing each other again. Then, in spring of 1864, the 51st faces the task of driving superior Union forces out of the Shenandoah Valley.

On the eve of the Battle of New Market, Monk is overjoyed to find himself unexpectedly reunited with John. But the circumstances that join them are also unexpectedly perilous for both.

AUTHOR INFORMATION & LINKS

Lee Passarella acts as senior literary editor for Atlanta Review magazine and served as editor-in-chief of Coreopsis Books, a poetry-book publisher. He also writes classical music reviews for Audiophile Audition.

Passarella’s poetry has appeared in Chelsea, Cream City Review, Louisville Review, The Formalist, Antietam Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Literary Review, Edge City Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Snake Nation Review, Umbrella, Slant, Cortland Review, and many other periodicals and ezines. He has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and his work has appeared in several anthologies as well.

Swallowed up in Victory, Passarella’s long narrative poem based on the American Civil War, was published by White Mane Books in 2002. It has been praised by poet Andrew Hudgins as a work that is “compelling and engrossing as a novel.” Passarella has published two poetry collections: The Geometry of Loneliness (David Robert Books, 2006) and Redemption (FutureCycle Press, 2014). His poetry chapbook Sight-Reading Schumann was published by Pudding House Publications in 2007.

Currently Available at:

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Createspace
Book Depository
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iTunes
And everywhere books are sold, Worldwide




Monday 9 March 2015

Tick Tock - A poem (of sorts)

Tick Tock


Beware my friends
The passing of time
Tick tock tick tock
You’ll soon be mine

Sweet as honey
Smooth as silk
I’ll drink your blood
Like a mother’s milk

Tick tock tick tock
The rhythmic sound
So soon will you be
Deep underground

A sharp edged knife
That catches the light
A beaded garrotte
Drawn up tight.

Murdered or maimed
Dead and buried
Pipped of your life like
A stone from a cherry

Tick tock tick tock
I’m coming for you
Tick tock tick tock
No ‘how do you do?’

I’ll cut out your heart
Your kidneys and lungs
I’ll dine on your liver
Your eyes and tongue

What fun we’ll have
Alone in your house
I’ll chase you
I’ll catch you
I’ll tear you down
In a river of blood
You’ll slowly drown

Tick tock tick tock
You can’t run away
Tick tock tick tock
The pendulum sways
Left right left right
then suddenly…
STOP
Like oranges and lemons
Chop… chop…
Chop.



Mathew Bridle

Friday 6 March 2015

Ravenwood Publishing





Title: Earthshine
Author: Chad T. Douglas
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy
Length: 306 pages
Release Date: January 30, 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1507540152

SYNOPSIS: Benni Dublanc is exemplary, which, in the year 2622 CE, is entirely ordinary. She’s young, she’s pretty, she’s in love, and she attends Academy Aeraea, a center of fashion, thought and modern style built on the pulse of the greatest city ever imagined—Genesia, Mars. Like all Genesians, Benni has never seen a blue sky, she can summon any and all knowledge into view with nothing more than a thought, makes her daily two-hundred kilometer commute in two minutes, and was sculpted into a model citizen beginning from the day she was born. Benni will never know famine, she will never know war, and after a horrific accident on the night of her twenty-second birthday, she will never be human again.

 

AUTHOR INFORMATION & LINKS

Chad T. Douglas was born in Wilkesboro, North Carolina in 1989. In 2002, he moved to Florida with his family and in December 2009, as a sophomore attending the University of Florida, Douglas published A Pirate’s Charm, the first novel of the Lore trilogy. One year later, he released his second novel, East and Eight. Around that time, Douglas became a staff writer for the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity at the Florida Museum of Natural History. When he wasn’t working on his novels, Douglas traveled with and wrote for the McGuire Center. Since 2010, he has visited Honduras,
Kenya, Ecuador, the Galapagos Islands and Mexico as a travel writer.
Douglas’s first novel, A Pirate's Charm, came to mind when he was a junior in high school. He began writing the Lore series for fun, and originally did not plan on publishing it. When he started college in 2008, he entered as an Architectural Design major, leaving the program in less than two weeks and immediately becoming an English major. One year later, in love with English and writing, Douglas began work on self-publishing the first installment of his historical fiction and fantasy trilogy. His first book signing took place at Books Inc, Gainesville, in February 2010, two months after publication. That same year, he published the second novel in the Lore trilogy, titled East and Eight. The third installment in the Lore trilogy, The Old World, was released in fall 2011. The Lore series has received honors in the 2011 New York Book Festival Book Contest, the 2012 Los Angeles Book Festival Book Contest, and the 78th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition.
Since 2009, Douglas has traveled to and appeared at book festivals in Florida, including the 1st, 2nd and 3rd annual UCF Book Festival in Orlando, the Ft. Myers Book Festival and the Miami International Book Festival. His first novel A Pirate’s Charm was a hit in two festivals in Georgia, including the AJC Decatur Book Festival and the Tybee Island Pirate Festival. In 2010, Douglas was the keynote speaker for the Marion County Library’s CREATE program. There, he signed books and shared personal stories of travel and self-publishing with 150 young writers who all received copies of A Pirate’s Charm courtesy of the library. In 2014, he made his first international appearance as an undiscovered American author at the Paris Book Fair at Salon du Livre. Douglas has since begun work on several new projects. His most recent novel, Earthshine (2012), is a work of science fiction.



 

Currently Available at:


 

BARNES & NOBLE


Tuesday 3 March 2015

Queue Here

Being British I have this innate ability to wait or queue up which is required at the time. Or so we’d like to think. We only discover just how untrue this is when we actually have to wait. And we wait everywhere: for buses, for taxis, for trains, plane automobiles, something to happen, something end, for people to stop having meetings in shop doorways. We wait even when we have an appointment which without fail will be late. I have to wait for people to go to the lavatory then clean up afterwards! I wait for people to get ready then I wait for them to get in the car and wait for them to get out of it.

Waiting, waiting, waiting, it should be an Olympic sport, I’d be a champion. Right now, for once, I’m not waiting for anything not even for one of children to do anything – nor the wife. I’m actually sitting having a rant, something that I never knew could be so satisfying.

Rant, Rant, Rant.

I don’t know what this old world is coming to but I bet there’s a queue somewhere out there forming right now of people waiting to find out. Where ever that particular queue is I for one will not be joining it. I have no interest in where the world is heading as it spins around and around following its elliptical path around the sun that’s waiting to die, apparently. I know where it’s going. It’s round to have another go and see if anyone is queuing up ahead of it.

That’s enough of this nonsense, I’m of to form an orderly queue at the fridge.