Editing 'The Dead Dragon Job'

After two years of working on this project, I can't believe I'm coming into the final straight: it's time to edit the completed manuscript into its polished, reader-ready form!

The first thing I always do is create a new outline on physical index cards, one per scene. I can't believe that such a short book (about 105k) needed over 100 cards, but I guess with this being a mystery/thriller, it's rather faster paced than my historical fantasy.

I like to mark which POV each scene is from using the same colour-coding as in Scrivener, and this time I'm using Kuretake Clean Color dot markers - one of the ends has a soft foam tip that makes a neat circular dot. Actually I have more POVs than the three pens shown here, but I didn't want to clutter up the photo.

This time around I only wrote the scene title and a one-line description of any critical action on each card, as I want to leave plenty of space for editorial notes. This is my last chance to catch any plot holes, so this is where I identify all the plots, subplots and character arcs and trace them from one scene to the next.

Once I've scribbled on all the cards (hopefully not too much!), I print out my "laundry list" of general points I want to address throughout the manuscript, then get down to work! I'm hoping this whole process will take me no more than a month, so that I can jump into NaNoWriMo on November 1st with the rough draft of Book 2!

I have an older post about my full editing process, if you want some help with your own novel revisions. I never do it exactly the same way twice, but the basic approach is always the same: start with the big picture issues and fix those before trying to line-edit the prose. Proofreading a scene that turns out to need a complete rewrite is a waste of anyone's time!