Edits are Fun, Really

I'm having a blast doing these edits on KILLER OF KILLERS. I really am. Talk about having a good time. But I knew I would. I loved doing the edits on THE VASE, too. The only real difference this time, besides being a different book, is what I mentioned yesterday. The POV thing.

I write in the third person omnipotent, and with THE VASE, it wasn't a problem. At all. But maybe I should say with those other two editors, it wasn't a problem. Because with my editors at Melange, it's like this: they want only one person's POV in a scene. That means when you are narrating in the third person, but you reveal something that only a particular person would know, like what they are thinking, then that person's POV, or point of view is the POV you are writing.

So you can't have person A thinking something, and then in the same scene you have person B thinking something. Or you can't reveal how person B is perceiving something if you've already written how person A is perceiving something. If you do, it's called "head-hopping" they say. But you can fix it if you write person B's actions or reactions from person A's perspective. In other words, you can write what person A is thinking person B is thinking. It's not as complicated as it sounds, really.

So that's what I'm learning this time around. And I'm fixing quite a bit of times that I did it. However, there are a couple times I think that it is necessary. I'm explaining it to my editors in the margins, and we'll see if they don't mind. So we'll see if the couple times I do have it will pass their inspection.

Also, I've eliminated an overuse of exclamation points and ellipses. I wanted pauses in the dialogue in many scenes, and to depict that, I used ellipses. You know. this: ... where I wanted a pause in the dialogue. They frown on that, too. Mostly they want commas there. And I have changed most of them to commas. But when I want a pause that a comma is not sufficient to depict, now I just end the sentence and begin a new one. You know, the good old-fashioned period. So that's an easy fix. Same thing with exclamation points. Easy fix. It's fixing the head-hopping that takes actual rewriting. But that's fun. Because writing is fun, and I get to revisit that with my story.

And like I've said many times in prior posts, this story is my all time favorite. I'm having a blast! (Oops, there's one of those pesky exclamation points. :)