I realize the pace of my blog entries has varied wildly over the past few weeks. Sometimes I post twice a day. Sometimes I go a few days between posts. On the two posts a day, well, all I can say, is that surprising stuff just happens. Like this. And this. Normally, I do try to space things out a bit.

But just because you see no activity here, doesn’t mean I love you any less that day. It probably means I am writing, or more precisely, editing. I spent part of September line-editing my book Labeled and am currently in the middle of a line-edit of Army of the Risen. I call it line-editing, but what I’m really doing is getting the words out of the way of the story. Good words increase the enjoyment of the reader. Bad words cause the reader to stumble. Bad words slow down the reader’s pace. Even though the story may actually have a quick pace, poorly chosen adjectives, passive verbs, repetitive sentence structure, and extra sentences, slow the turning of the page. In the worst case, these artifacts can drive the reader to close the book altogether. This, for a writer, is a very bad thing.

So even though doing back-to-back line-edits greatly dulls my desire to sit in front of the computer, day after day, the result is that books I had ‘finished’ quite a while ago, are brought up to my new standard, and thus are ready to go back to beta readers for another go-around. If they say the book still needs work, I know it is a problem with the story, and probably not the words.

One of the side effects of editing so much, is that you become very picky when reading other people’s books. I’m reading a book right now that really could have used another round of line-editing, and it’s driving me nuts. A good story can be brought to its knees by poor writing.

During the last month, I’ve also been re-plotting Nowhere Home (the sequel to Nowhere Wild), so that I at least know where that story is going when I sit down to do the next round of edits on Nowhere Wild later this month. I’ve still got some major plot points to figure out, but it’s getting closer.

At some point in the next 3 months, I hope to wrap up all of these edits, and start on something new. Besides Nowhere Home, I’ve got two other books plotted out in great detail, and I can’t wait to get rolling.

But first things first. Back to editing.