Friday, August 18, 2023

Developmental Edits - Saved by the Quill

 Greetings. It's been some time since I've updated my blog and that's because I've been diligently working through rewrites and edits to my manuscript. At the end of March, I sent my work to Robin Connelly with Saved by the Quill to perform a developmental edit.

For those not familiar with this type of edit, she read the whole manuscript (106,000 words at the time) and provided detailed feedback and analysis of areas I could change and update to strengthen the story and the characters. Her analysis was fantastic, and her pricing was very reasonable. I can't recommend her highly enough. Here is her link if you need editing of all kinds: Saved By The Quill (wordpress.com)

She provided me with her feedback in May and I've just now finished making all the updates. She gave me a multitude of suggestions and I incorporated at least 80% of her feedback, so it was a lot of work.I took it in a two-step process. First, I did the rewrites based on her feedback and saved that as a new version. The edits ballooned the word count to almost 109,000. 

With the next (current version) 8, I edited the whole thing and got it down to 103,000 words. The story and characters are much stronger, and I feel good about the work. Looking for a couple Beta+ readers to look it over. I say Beta+ because having gone through such a great developmental edit, I'm not expecting readers to find much to critique about the story itself, although of course I could be mistaken.

At this stage the feedback I'm really looking for is whether or not they enjoyed the story. If they had a good time reading it, that's good enough for me. Of course, I also hope they can point out any inaccuracies.

I have a proofreader lined up for after I get feedback from the beta readers so things are moving right along.


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