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Under the Darkened Moon once had a character named Kal.  Kal, alas, is no more.  Oh, he still exists in the story, but he is no longer called Kal.  His new name in the final manuscript is Tarek.

Why did I change his name?  Ultimately it was because too many characters had names starting with the letter K.  Kyel and Kath were enough, so I changed Kal to something else.

The decision was made easier during the live read edit when my wife was reading the story.  She has this particular drawl to her speech where she constantly replaces the “a” sound in words with an “e” and visa versa.  She also does the same thing with the “e”s to “i”s for some reason.  But she only does it on certain words.  For example, pen is pin, but ten is not tin.  She never pronounced one of the characters, called Den, as Din. (more…)

This is a follow-up to my post last week titled Don’t Believe The Hype, It Hurts Later.

A friend of mine recently received a plethora of not so kind reviews on his self-published novel. He complained to me that people were just being cruel and hateful and how he feared it would hurt sales of his book. After all, he reasoned, his wife read the story and thought it was excellent. When I asked him who else read the story he informed me, “no one else.” Oh boy.

Comments on his novel included lots of 2 and 3 start reviews. These reviews focused on the high number of misspellings and a lack of character development. Were they really being mean? He assured me that they were and that the complaints sere unfounded. Said friend gave me a free copy to read. I told him if I liked it I would give him a good review. (more…)

Well, I’m on page 208 of my latest edit for Under the Darkened Moon.  A lot of words got taken out in the first 100 pages, 3,508 in total.  But in the second 100 pages, 1,000 words have been added to help out the story.  I was trying to see if I could drop the word count from 150,000 down to around 140,000.  Doesn’t seem likely at this point, but who knows.  Maybe I can hit 145,000.  I’m not going to force it.  The story is as long as the story is.

After this edit I am planning on having live read sessions and edits.  My wife will read the story exactly as written and I will listen to see how it flows.  We’ll be doing one chapter a night to keep from getting burned out on the reading/editing process.  Once that edit is done, I am going to find six people to read and critique the latest draft before beginning the submission process.

This is now, officially, my 1oth edit of Under the Darkened Moon, my debut writing project which I started on July 18th, of last year.  The live read edit will be my 11th and, hopefully, completed by the end sometime around the 1 year anniversary of my attempt at writing a novel to be published.  Lots of hours put in so far and hopefully it will pay off.  I’ve been keeping track and so far the project has consumed right around 1,550 hours.

Well, back to editing.