One round of editing finished, one million to go. (Seriously, this is a huge step, and I'm pretty excited!)
As this is the third time, I've run through editing a full book through Google docs I've learned a few tricks to make the hard work of editing a book a little easier, so in honor of my third book, I thought I'd share three of them. I feel like this is obvious, but no one is sponsoring me. This is just what I've found that works after a couple years of trial and error.
1. If you use Grammarly, you may know it has an extension for Google Chrome so you can save all the work of copying, pasting, and risking losing all your formatting in the process. BUT you may want to disable Grammarly (or write using a different browser) until you are ready to have a dedicated run-through just for grammar checking unless you edit as you write. Why? Grammarly works pretty well, but when you have a one-hundred-plus page manuscript it can get a little buggy. So, the fewer non-Grammarly edits you can manage, the lower your odds of crashing the browser.
2. This one is a recent discovery for me. I've talked about my action lists before; the list of things I need to change while editing my books. In the past I always kept it in a separate document and referred to it every day before beginning editing and checking back when necessary. I now know that there is a better way: Google Tasks.
You can find it by clicking this little blue checkmark here: 
Once inside you can put in all the times from your action list in whatever order you like. You can even add subtasks!
I know that moving from one document to another doesn't seem like a big deal, but it's yet another time for me to get distracted, and no one needs that. The only big downside for me is that you cannot access Tasks while you are in full screen mode.
3. This last trick isn't strictly for Google docs, but rather for editing in general. Edit in a quiet location, or at least with sound-canceling headphones/earbuds. There are so many incredibly talented writers who have a true passion and gift for editing, but dyslexia and being easily distracted make it quite difficult for me, and the last thing I need is to be jumping up every time a neighbor closes their car door. A good pair of headphones with some calming piano music helps me more than I can say.
Well, that's it for this week! What tricks do you use when you are editing? Feel free to share them below!
Have a great day, and keep writing!
No comments:
Post a Comment