My life in the editing cave

I’ve been ensconced in the editing cave for a couple of months now.  The Valois Mistress is my first full-length novel and I’m still in the process of learning how to get it right.  Once I finish fiddling with the edits, I get to send it to my editor.

I’ve published a series of novellas in the past, and while editing them was an intensive project, that didn’t hold a candle to how overwhelming a full length manuscript can be.  I’ve worried how I can keep track of several scenes over a 300+ Word Document, and at the very least the practical considerations of isolating a three to five page scene.

Scrivener has been helping me a LOT during this process.  I would be tearing my hair out if it weren’t for that program.  I debated for months over whether I would buy it, but the 50% discount that comes with completing NaNoWriMo made it really affordable for me.



I put the Three Graces Trilogy through Grammarly, but I wasn’t pleased at all with the results.  I knew I needed a grammar editor before the manuscript went to a human one, but I wasn’t going with Grammarly.  It’s just not worth the money.

Enter Pro Writing Aid.  Once again, this isn’t a paid post, just my genuine experience with a program.  Not only is it much cheaper than Grammarly, I get tons of reports from the program.  I found adverbs and passive verbs I never even realized I wrote in the first place.



The reports are taking a long time to run (it’s a web-based program, so I have to be online in order to use it), and I do each of them separately.  I feel as if I’ve been editing for years, but apparently it could take even longer.  Maybe one day I’ll look back and remark how the editing time seemed like it flew by, but right now I hate doing it.  I can’t wait to get the book out and work on the second one in the series.