Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing

I received my edits for my YA space opera novella on Tuesday night. I had a stinking headache so couldn’t even glance at them. Wednesday being my writing day, I flexed by fingers in the morning and charged right in. I read the document through first to get a feel for what I was up against and I was pleasantly surprised.

I’m happy to say the edits were rather light. There was no taking out Australian idioms. Apparently I over used ellipses in this particular piece. I don’t normally over use them so I was surprised. I had to cut up a few chapters to make them similar lengths to the rest, which included new chapter titles and dovetailing the ends and the beginnings of those. Some very minor tweakage and I was done.

It’s short, 30,000 words so I finished the edits in the day. However, I printed it out to have a read over, which I did last night.

I do feel pressured so lucky for me my first time was only 30,000 words. I will probably freak when I get edits for a larger work.

The edits came in track changes, which I really hate mostly because of the RSI. However, I had something up my sleeve and also made the edits go rather quickly. My dictation software has a macro so that all I have to do is highlight the correction with the cursor and say
‘Accept change’ or ‘Reject change’. However, in my case I had just to say ‘Accept change’.

So last night, I emailed them off.
Time to go to work now.