Walking Into Editing Blindly (Pun Intended)

I love to write. It is my honest to God passion in life. It is the one outlet in life that I have and can call my own. It is no one else’s but mine and no one can take it away from me. Well technically, if my computer breaks or gets stolen it could be taken from me but that’s beside the point.

Now don’t get me wrong, I of course have my girls, my dog, my house and my health. When I say it’s the only thing I have to call my own I mean outside of home life. It’s something I can get lost in even if only for a little while. It’s more than just a hobby for me. It’s my dream. Even if God forbid not one copy of my book ever sells, at least I know I did it. I created something that I poured my heart, my soul and my time into and put it out there for the whole world to see.

For the most part I can write about anything. The hardest part for me though is the editing. I never used to mind editing and still don’t for the most part. But since I have lost my sight it has gotten so much more cumbersome.

The fun aspect of editing that has always been for me is content editing. You know when you move into a new house and you get to unpack the boxes and decide where everything is going to go? That’s how I feel when I do content editing. It can be a totally enjoyable experience to rework sentences and add things you had forgot about. It’s cool to be able to dig in and develop characters and really put yourself into their head and see how they tick.

The great part about getting into their head is that what’s inside it is whatever you want. You are the mastermind. It’s up to you how a person or a scene is formed. It is puddy in your capable hands. However you decide to shape it is all on you.

Okay, so now that the fluffy side of editing is taken care of it’s down to the nitty gritty stuff. Now you have to check and see that all your paragraphs are indented properly, commas are where they should be and you didn’t run any words together as one in your haste of finishing the story.

Seems fairly easy right? WRONG! At least when you’re blind it’s wrong anyway.

Sometimes the all mighty spell checker doesn’t pick things up. For instance if you spelled the word “right” but you meant to say “Write”, it might not be picked up.

When you can see, this isn’t a problem because you can give it a once or twice over and say to yourself… “Hey, that isn’t supposed to be like that”. When you are blind, you hear the voice of your computer say the word “right” and assume it is the right spelling. It doesn’t sound any different if something is spelled wrong or not. If you don’t have someone to check your work for you then the task becomes quite tedious. You have to go sentence by sentence, word by word and in some cases even letter by letter to fix problems. That is not a fun or enjoyable process.

Luckily, with Clandestine I have the privilege of working with my beloved Gram. She has been a God send in the editing dilemma. Without her I wouldn’t be as far as I am with the book. She has been amazing at picking up on the natty gritty that makes me want to pull my hair out.

I have a tendency to type pretty quickly when my creative juices are flowing. I get all the words out in a rush of pages before they overwhelm my brain into explosion. There’s nothing wrong with that except for the fact that it’s easy to forget spaces between words or have the problem mentioned about where you type one word but mean another. For whatever reason when you run two words together it isn’t always caught by the spell checker. The reason for this astounds me. The word clearly is spelled wrong. It is two words that have been smushed together that in no language or context make a new word.
Well, that’s not totally true. I am thinking of compiling my own dictionary of words that I have created. Some of them are kinda cool actually. Just saying

Anyway, I am over half way done editing for Clandestine I can hardly wait for its total completion when I can sit back and enjoy my handwork. Well, at least for like five minutes because then it’s on to marketing it and fully jumping into Divinity.

Not to mention the other million and five half finished projects and tid bits that are floating inside my computer waiting to be crafted. I am fully committed to finishing each and every last one of them. Or more accurately, I have to finish them or I will probably be committed to a rubber room. Not that there’s anything wrong with that for those readers who are scanning this post from the comfort of their straight jacket.

But I digress. I really appreciate all of my readers and those of you who have supported me from the beginning when my only publicly viewed writing was on Playing The Blind Card. Oh, and also my family who have been forced to read all my writing since the beginning of time when I first learned what I Haiku was and scribbled my first story down with my super cool metallic ink pens (thanks mom and dad).

Until next time remember…

Write write write and just when you think you can’t write anymore, do some typing. xoxoxoxoxox