My writing process-Post Beta edits

 Hi there! Sorry about the missed weeks lately, editing drains my brain, and I'm currently editing the LAST BOOK IN THE A SPY'S MEMORY SERIES!!!

It's time to get back to my writing process series. (Wow, this has lasted MUCH longer than I thought it would!)

Last time we ended with handing my manuscript over to my AMAZING Beta readers, so let's pick up where we left off. 

As I've said before, you don't need to take every piece of advice that your Beta's offer, (you are the author, after all, you may know something they don't about why you did what you did) but you do need to consider everything they say; if they are thinking it, someone else probably will too. So after I get my comments and replies back, I go through them one by one, gathering all of the larger more sweeping comments into my action list, and keeping the more targeted comments where they are, sometimes fixing anything super obvious that they may have commented on, (such as typos.) 

After I have all of this written down, I go through it, taking special note of any areas where my Beta's said the same thing. I try to objectively consider all of the notes, though I sometimes need a second opinion, (I rely upon my mom for that too.) Once I have a solid list of issues, I get ready to tackle them. NOTE: smaller issues are MUCH easier to fix than sweeping ones, but they should be treated with equal respect in editing. 

A lot of the time when I start out on fixing these issues, I will need to take a few steps back to figure out HOW I can fix sweeping issues, as well as better interweave the corrections, so they don't feel tacked on. This can take several tries to get right, and it's very frustrating. As I work my way through my book again, fixing issues, I will often note even more issues as I go (due to the amount of time it's been out of my hands/mind) so I'll note these on my action list, or correct them when I see them, depending on how large/difficult these issues will be to correct. 

As you would think, the next round of edits is spent correcting any lingering issues; anything at all that may be left on my action list should be fixed at this point, as it is more or less one of the last content edits my book will be getting.

Then for the next edit, I work on polishing what is left, before running the whole thing through Grammarly.

That's it for this week, I was going to try to finish, but trust me, you don't want to read the mega-blog that would take.

Have a great day, and keep writing!