Jumping Off The Hamster Wheel:
I realized lately that I have not posted a blog in a long time and I asked myself what was the reason for this? Prior to this spring I had been writing two blogs a month consistently. However I realized that I haven't written one since May 6th which means I missed the middle of May and the beginning of June. So what was the reason? Another blogger that I follow named it perfectly, I was busy, “churning” meaning that I was stuck on doing one thing, namely editing and formatting. As you may know I will be publishing my second book in my Elven Quest series very shortly and I had worked on making some edits that my father, (another writer) had suggested. Then I set it up on Createspace and printed the proof. When I received the proof in the mail I quickly realized that the inside did not look the way I wanted it to. It was the wrong color paper, I had forgotten to add an author Bio and the chapters looked too plain. I gave the proof to my mother in law, who is a former teacher, to double check the spelling and grammar for me. Grammar is my worst enemy and my biggest fault! I needed all the help I could get. She took it and has been editing it one last time for me. In the meantime I decided to fix the formatting in order to make the inside look perfect.
After I finished the formatting my
mother in law had not returned the book yet so I moved on to editing
and formatting book three and then book four. I figured I was on a
role I should just keep going. That was not a smart idea. As a writer
you have to be practicing your craft of writing as well as doing
other projects. You need to do things simultaneously but I got stuck
on my editing hamster wheel and could not stop. It wasn't until I
read an awesome blog this morning by a fellow writer that I realized
I was doing it and that needed to jump off of the wheel. I included
the link to his blog below for your reading pleasure.
The thing is, I know that any time
spent working on other projects is not a waist of time. I do not feel
mad at myself for not writing, because I learned some good lessons
during this editing frenzy. The first lesson came when I was trying
to format the book. I researched what size it should be, how to fit
it into the margins properly etc. I went through it and set every
chapter up the right way. Then I looked at the chapter headings and
realized they looked a little plain. I wondered if I should add some
kind of symbol to make them look, “fancy”. I wondered, what do
other writers do? So I began researching. I looked in about 20-30
other books to see whether or not authors add a little something to
their chapter headings. What I found was that about 80-85% of them
do. And I liked the way they looked when these authors did add them.
So I set to work. I found some symbols that I liked and added them to
every chapter with the same size and in the same place. Believe it or
not it was a lot of work. Then once it was complete I saved it and
then exported it as a PDF. To my horror when I opened the PDF I saw
that all of my hard work did not pay off!! The symbol did not
transfer correctly and it looked crazy, like wingdings. I was so mad,
I may have screamed a little. 😉 So, it was back to the research lab
for me.
I watched several Youtube videos and
researched what other writers had done in this scenario. I came
across a good blog about making sure that whatever symbol you use is
one that a PDF program recognizes, so a Times New Roman symbol or a
Courier New symbol, this person said was your best bet. I looked
through the symbols under Times New Roman and found one that I liked.
This time, before I added it throughout the book I added it to one
section and then exported to a PDF to see if it worked. I can't tell
you how happy I was when I saw that it did. I went back and added
that symbol throughout the book and I was all set.
The second lesson that I learned
that needed a bit of research took place after having a conversation
with my mother in law about conjunctions. She said to me, “I am
crossing out all of your conjunctions because your book takes place
in an older time period and they wouldn't have used conjunctions
like, don't, won't, can't back then. Conjunctions were not used until
the 1900's.” I knew that if she changed these for the second book
then I would have to change them for all of the books, including the
previously written first book which I am planning to re-issue. I
spent four hours one day changing these conjunctions and only got
through two chapters. I was tired and frustrated because some of the
sentences were awkward after the change, like the characters saying
“let's go see what happens.” was changed to “let us go see what
happens.” That's super awkward to read right? I thought so and so I
thought, wait a minute, what do other authors do? I
remembered my publisher telling me that the key to editing a novel is
making sure that it is readable not that it is perfect English. So
again I researched by looking in other books. I specifically pulled
out books that were supposed to take place in older time periods and
guess what I found...All of them used conjunctions! Even well known
authors like Robert Jordan uses conjunctions in his Wheel of Time
series which takes place in an old fashioned fantasy world. I
promptly texted my mother in law and told her what I had found. She
understood and agreed to leave them alone. I went back and reversed
the changes that I had made and learned a little something in the
process.
So
no, I haven't written much lately and regret that, but I've learned
some really good lessons that will be useful when publishing the rest
of my books so I can't feel like it was time wasted. It was a good
experience and will make my books better quality later.
And
so dear readers I am officially jumping off of my editing hamster
wheel. I will be trying to write more of my blogs, my books and my
workshops on a more regular basis. But this just goes to show that
even if you too get stuck, “churning” give yourself a break and
look at the positive side of you time spent, there is always a
positive side. 😊 Take care dear readers until next time and
remember, writing=happiness ;).
Here's
the blog post of the author that I liked:
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