Despite how busy and strange this month has been, I still managed to cross the Camp NaNoWriMo finish line for the fourth straight year in a row!  It's hard to believe I've been at this, in a constant and dedicated fashion, long enough for it to theoretically be a college degree.  This is, by no means, to say that I feel like I know everything about How To Be A Self-Published Author: that'd be impossible.  I will say that there are probably a few secrets lurking in the practice of surrounding yourself with people and experiences which make you happy and/or inspired.    (For the curious: those current experiences, for me, include watching the entirety of Twin Peaks, attending a community theatre performance of The Hound of the Baskervilles, helping a friend move, picking blueberries while there's still dew on them, and stepping up my artistic noodling away from the written word.)

Those of you with a sharp eye may notice that I've changed the Arts & Crafts section of my website and removed my link to my DeviantArt gallery, replacing it with an onsite one.  Not only does it make it easier for you all to see my art, but it helps pave the way for my secondary creative venture: an arts and crafts storefront called Gifts of Awen. Some of it is related to Aviario, but a good deal of it will be more inspirational and metaphysical in nature, focusing on the intent of creating magical and/or peaceful art for small spaces.  My first project for Gifts of Awen is a series of artist cards dedicated to the seven chakras.  Here's a peek at the first two, which I completed last night:

My goal is to also create postcards and other prints of these, along with other small art designed to help people find insight, inspiration, and a moment of peace in a busy, cluttered world.  Commisssions will also be available through the site: I have several slots currently open.   If you would like to see what else I have up at the moment, I'd be honored if you'd join me over at the storefront.   Those of you who follow me on Instagram will also see pictures of new pieces as they're completed and posted!   This may also mean the return of The Author's Oracle ... only time will tell.   For now, I'm headed back to my creative corner to chip away at The Proper Bearing and work on some more illustrations.   I hope you all have a lovely week!

Starting with the basics, ReadWriteThink has a checklist that's meant for classroom use, but still has some great starting points.  It's also printable for use in writers' groups, workshops, or NaNoWriMo Write-Ins!

Fiction University has two great pages: The Spit Shine, which is a great last run-through, and more importantly, Crossing Words Off Your List, which covers the author's most important self-editing tool.  The "Bad Words" list, which goes by many names, always serves the same basic prinicple: to help remove words which are either unnecessary or overused.  Every author has a handful which are unique to them, and sometimes they aren't even words.  (Confession: In The Cards had a lot of unnecessary ellipses before the final edit.)

Though those words are a good first step, they aren't everything.  Grammar Girl's Editing Checklist covers the bases on ... you guessed it, grammar!   This one is laid out simply, and yet very comprehensive, which makes it a good one to print out and keep in your editing binder if you prefer to edit on paper (like yours truly).

WordStream's Self-Editing Checklist includes talking points on all of the above, with an extra dose of humor.   I take their final point with a grain of salt, however: they stress paring down your sentences as much as possible.  While I'm a fan of a tightly written sentence, I also believe that keeping some of the proverbial meat on the bone helps you define your writing voice.  Your mileage may, as with most method advice, vary.  

Finally, there is my own Rainbow Editing Method, which I use in conjunction with my personal Bad Words file.  I developed it while I was working on From The Desk of Buster Heywood, and it's gone a long way toward helping me identify my own problem areas.  You're welcome to use it, too!  There's a wrap-up post with links to all the sections right here.

Now, I'm about to dive into my own manuscript, so I'll see you all next Wednesday!  Should you be up to the same task, happy editing ... and I hope you all have a great week!

We've finally reached the end of the Rainbow!  It's hard to believe that I started writing about this three months ago! Last week, I promised a tally of my own edits to From the Desk of Buster Heywood, and I do try to keep my promises.  I used this tally to find the areas of my writing that needed the most work and conscious effort, and hopefully I'll have different results when I start editing the next book, In the Cards.  For those of you who aren't interested in this sort of thing?  I apologize, and there is already a fantastic anecdotal entry simmering in my brain for next week. So, without further ado, proof of my own imperfection (she said, grinning).  

Sophistication (Original Entry)

• Starting sentences with action (-ing) verbs: 30
• Adverbs: ... I stopped counting and just started cutting the buggers.
• Abundance of short sentences: 0
• Overuse of italics or exclamation points: 1
• Cliches: 1
• Unnecessary Profanity: 0 (Some people swear like sailors.  Jeremiah is one of them.)
• Overuse of mundane  detail: 20  (Sadly, most of these were descriptors of office life.)

Show vs. Tell (Original Entry)

• Summaries of big plot events: 0
• Inability to resist the urge to explain: 12
• Repetition of detail: 7
• Overuse of words/plot devices/effects: 5  (These were mostly quirks that I had to find new descriptions of.)
• Redescription of events: 1

Character & P.O.V (Original Entry)

• Telling traits vs. showing them in other ways: 6
• Backstory that only needs to be known, not shown: 5 (One of these was a hefty 15 pages in the first chapter: a flashback that will probably show up as a short piece elsewhere.)
• Real dialogue vs. pure exposition: 3
• Inconsistent P.O.V: 4
• Description inconsistent with emotion: 2

Character, Pacing, and Beats (Original Entry)

• Details the character wouldn't notice: 4
• Character development disproportionate to plot: 0
• Ineffective or absent tangents: 13
• Overabundant hobbies or mentions thereof: 1
• Beats (poorly spaced): 0
• Beats (mundane): 3
• Beats (rhythmically awkward): 5
• Imbalance of passage length: 1
• Imbalance of chapter length: 0

Dialogue, Monologue & Sound (Original Entry)

• Emotion in description instead of dialogue: 2
• Replace verbs with "said": This is another one where I stopped counting and just had at it.
• Unnecessary speaker attribution: I stopped counting these, too..
• Noun before name: 0
• Inconsistent character reference: Tons.  90% of these were Cam vs. Cameron. 
• Ellipses for gaps: All present & accounted for.
• Dashes for interruptions: Also all present & accounted for.
• Dialogue without room for misinterpretation: 0
• Awkward dialect: 0
• Unnecessary interior monologue: 9
• Unnatural-sounding or out-of-character dialogue: 9
  

Voice (Original Entry)
I could break these down by chapter, since I did make a list of them, but that would ruin so many surprises.  Here are the things a lot of my favorite passages had in common:

• description of strong emotion
• personified concepts, 
  
• witty banter or funny dialogue
• atmospheric scene setting
• tense conversations
• use of foreshadowing or placing of points
• pulling together any of those foreshadowing instances or points

Other Edits & Instances of "Kill Your Darlings"
A lot of my generic edits, done in pink ink, involved tightening up sentences, or reordering them so that they read more smoothly on the page.  A few places needed a little more "oomph" to ramp up suspense, and others needed extra taken out to speed up the pace.  My proverbial darlings, passages that I loved but didn't necessarily need, got highlighted in yellow.  The fifteen pages in Chapter 1 I mentioned earlier were a doozy, since that scene was the first glimpse I had of Buster's sister, Dee, and loved her immediately.  I also had a few funny lines which were pretty good, but didn't fit Buster quite right.  These have been saved and tucked away for later use. One particular darling remains, but in a pared-down and much more subtle form, to help tie the first book to its successors.  I won't give it away, but a couple of books from now, it'll be clear as day in a reread.

That officially wraps up my entries on the Rainbow Editing Method!  Thank you for sticking through it with me, and I hope that some of what I've had to say over these last few months has been useful ... or at the very least, somewhat entertaining.  See you all next Thursday!

Okay, now you all know what my favorite color is - and my Gram's, too.  One of these days I intend to tell you all about her and how much I owe to her for my creative spirit, but today is not that day.  Today we are at the end of the Editing Rainbow, and the pot of gold is a marked-up manuscript ready for you to go through and clean up.  I know, at first glance it doesn't sound that rewarding, but I get excited about these things. It means that the thing you spent SO LONG putting together and pulling your hair out over is one step closer to being presentable to the general public, and not just your long-suffering close friends & beta readers.  (Hi, ladies, you know who you are, and I love you all.)

The best part is that purple, Voice, is the easiest color to edit.  I don't even have any bullet points, this week.  It's that simple.  

This is the part where you go through your manuscript and look for the bits that make you say "YES. I have read this story so many times that my eyes are about to start bleeding, but I still absolutely love this."  It can be as big as a whole scene, or as tiny as a description ... One which sticks out for me during my edit of From the Desk of Buster Heywood is the detail of a lost mitten "marinating in a pile of slush".  I just love the way it sounds and flows on the page, and the picture is crystal clear to me.  Go through your draft and find those parts.  Underline them in purple.   If you have any lines that are the exact opposite which you haven't already cleaned up with other colors, put a jagged purple line to set them apart.

The lines that you like the sound and look of best are the ones that fell into your lap while you were sitting under the word tree - they are yours by chance, ripe and ready and perfect.  They are the cornerstones of your writing voice, and I would be willing to bet that you didn't even think about being "voice-y" or "really good" when you wrote them.  Be proud of these.  Hold them up in front of your mirror and say "Damn, you wrote this?  You rock!"  Take a nice ego boost and feel good about yourself.   This may be the least rule-intensive part of the editing method, but it may also be the most important, because it's about building confidence in your own writing.  You might have all those red adverbs, clunky blue beats, and redundant orange bits in there staring you down, and sure, fixing them all is going to be tricky and daunting, but hey!  You have all that purple that you're still proud of in the middle of it all, holding it together.  You're a badass. You wrote a whole entire book, and there are parts of it you don't immediately want to throw out the window, even in what Anne Lamott calls the "shitty first draft". Go, you.

Now that you've had your moment of triumph, it's time to take that purple prose and look at it under a magnifying glass.  What is it that made those passages work for you?  Why do they sing?  Do they have a common thread, or were they just a perfect fit for that particular point in the story?  You're figuring out your strengths, the place where your voice shines.  Once you break that down, you can apply it to the places that aren't so strong.  The biggest discovery I made during this phase was that I write best when I can relate closely to someone in the scene... so going forward, I tried to find something I could do the same with in as many situations as possible, even if the character wouldn't react the same way I would.  I know a lot of writers say this, when they talk about writing, but they say it because it's true: bring yourself to the page.  Your readers will notice the life there, every time.

So, that's it for purple.  It's all about following your heart and your gut.  But what happens when you finish that whole rainbow?  That's up to you.  I thought I'd be good just typing in my corrections, but then I decided to take a tally of how it all wound up and find what my biggest weaknesses were.  I'll be sharing my breakdown in next week's post, so that when From the Desk... is finally available, you can compare and see just how much I hacked it apart before sharing it with you. 

Oh, and here's Anne Lamott's essay on shitty first drafts, courtesy of Canvas online courses.  There's a link to a PDF of it, there.  If you like what you read, I suggest you pick up the book it became part of, "Bird by Bird".  It's one of my favorite books on writing - I'm saving the others for a later post.  Here's to the rainbow, and I'll see you next week!

Really, if there's one thing all of these dialogue-editing points have in common, it's this: don't bring your reader up out of the scene.  Think about the last time someone interrupted you while you were in the middle of a really good book.  Now, imagine if the author did that to you!  These editing points will help keep your reader comfortably engrossed in your scenes, and they'll come back out to the real world and remember that they were actually reading a book when they're ready: not when you remind them that they are.

Okay, here's the deal.  I know I said that this would be the last post in the Rainbow Editing Method, but I'm feeling like it needs one more to pull it together and wrap it up well.  So, I beg your patience in that regard. The second shade of blue - Dialogue, Editing and Sound - is dark blue. I tend to be heavy on dialogue, since I write a lot of loudmouths who like to bicker with one another.  So, since this is the biggest checklist I have, let's dive right in!  We'll start with mechanics and move into meatier stuff toward the end.

• Always put name before noun.  Unless you're from Elizabethan times, "said William" is archaic.  Enough said?
• Keep character references consistent.  I know, I get tired of writing a character's name over and over, too.  But if you're writing a party scene and "the meter maid knocked over the chocolate fountain", your reader's probably going to have to stop and remember whether that's referring to Lucy, Rita, or Prudence.
• Use ellipses for gaps or pauses, and dashes for interruptions.  I had to break myself into this habit: I'm pretty fond of dashes.  But if you're consistent with these, it's easier to distinguish between someone who's mid-thought, or just noticed something that's about to turn your scene on its ear.
• For the most part, use 'said'.  I admit to fighting this one tooth and nail, until I realized how much weight good dialogue could carry.  Nothing jerks your reader out of a great conversation by the collar like building up to a reluctant confession, then having your guilty party whisper, sigh, or (heavens, no) murmur it.  If you absolutely need to remind the reader who's speaking, but have no beat to go with it?  Said.  Said, said, said.  It's such a simple word that they'll roll right over it without hesitation.  With that in mind....
• Can speaker attributions be dropped or replaced with beats?  If you have two characters in a conversation, your reader should only need an occasional reminder of who's speaking.  Likewise, if only one person in the room is written with a specific dialect, they'll go stickin' out right an' cleah without you needin' ta point 'em out.  Ayuh.   If you can't axe an attribution and you're dead set against a simple "said", put a beat on it: have the character do something relevant to how they're feeling or where they are.  
• Let dialogue show emotion as much as possible, not the description.  It's far more telling and interesting to have Bill say: "That dirty, rotten, spud-muttering jackanape!  I was saving that last can of Pepsi Clear for a special occasion!" than "Liam took the last soda".  Of course, if it adds to the scene, you can always throw in a nice, solid beat like kicking the fridge closed and stubbing his toes in the process.   Just remember that people can use very different words, depending on how they feel, and don't always think before they speak.  Which leads us to...
• Let dialogue be misinterpreted! Communication is a tricky business: your characters aren't always going to understand one another.  Terry may say his friend is over-reacting about that can of soda, until Bill explains that it's the last of a case his great-aunt brought to his high school graduation.  (Hey.  We never said poor Bill was 100% sane.)  If you let your characters misunderstand from time to time, your scenes could end up going in some unexpected, yet useful, directions.  Obviously, this sort of thing applies to language barriers, too. 
• Is your dialogue in-character?  At the surface, this seems like a pretty dumb question: you're the author and they're in-character if you say they are, right?  Wrongo.  Aside from killing off favorite characters, losing sight of their motivation is the most likely thing to make your reader want to throw your book across the room and hesitate to pick it back up again.  I had some fantastic zingers coming out of Buster's mouth during a climactic moment: really great, hard-hitting stuff.  But I was caught up in what some of the best lines would be for the scene in general: not the best lines for Buster, who  wasn't anywhere near mean-spirited enough to actually say them.   Re-reading that scene in the context of the rest of the novel felt like watching a stranger.  So, the lines went back into my bin of words, where a harder character with far less tact and consideration will probably dig them out later.
• Interior Monologue: Is it necessary, and does it sound different from your narration?   As a rule of thumb, try to only share the interior thoughts of your main character.  If you delve into the heads of too many other people, readers may be confused about who they're supposed to focus on.  You're following one - maybe two or three - people through this story, and they're the ones you want to have people relate to the most.  But if your main character's internal voice sounds too much like your narration, you may need to step back to the previous checkpoint and get inside their head a little.  You might have all sorts of flowery, wordy ways to think about what's in front of them: but they may not be the sort of person to have the same thought.
• Read it aloud.   The best way to check your dialogue is to sit down with it and read it like a script.  If it sounds scripted, it needs work so that it'll flow like a natural conversation.  I know that we're talking about writing, here, but for a great example, check out this snippet of conversation about self-defense from Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof".  (The movie is rated R, so avoid it if you're not fond of strong language.)