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M. Darusha Wehm

Science fiction and mainstream books by award-winning author M. Darusha Wehm

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editing

No News is… No News

January 24, 2013

photo credit: Esthr via photopin

Attentive readers might be wondering where the new book is. After all, it’s a new year, and I do usually release a new novel in the new year. So, what gives?

Well, the quick answer is that my previous schedule is no longer my usual schedule. I finished the first final drafts of two novels in December, so they are now being read by beta readers and getting ready for whatever final lives they will have. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with them, either, since neither of them are Dex books. One of them isn’t even genre fiction. When I know, you’ll know, but for now there’s no new novel news.

What about Dex?

People specifically ask me when the next Dex book is coming out, and the answer is I don’t know. I don’t even know if there will be a next Dex book. At the end of The Beauty of Our Weapons things are changing for Dex and co. and I’m not sure where they are going from there.

I don’t want to be one of those writers who keeps churning out series books just to ride the wave – if I don’t have a great story I need to tell about Dex, I’m not going to write a Dex book. So, we’ll see. I’m not saying there won’t be any more, I’m just saying that if there are more, I don’t know when they’ll materialize.

So while there’s no news in this post, I’m not idle over here. I’ve also got short stories on the go and another project to keep me busy. Hopefully there will be new stuff for you to read soon. For some value of soon anyway.

In the meantime, I’ve posted The Interview, a short story not about Dex but set in The Cubicle Men universe. It was originally published in Podioracket Presents – Glimpses, an anthology of stories by podiobooks authors giving a taste of the worlds of their novels. I hope you like it.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: editing, short stories, writing

Write Better: Link Roundup

October 4, 2012

photo credit: Mr. Wright via photopin cc

Two very different items to help us write mo’ better prose today:

Via Ripley Patton on Google+, Pro Writing Aid. It offers a free web service to scan chunks of prose for editing infractions. I was skeptical, but it caught some items for legitimate concern in the test piece I gave it. And it had me at homonyms – all that analysis does is scan for known homonyms, but by calling them out in red, you can easily see if you’ve got they’re or their in there.

I haven’t investigated their fancy dictionaries or the community on the site, but the editing tool looks like a great addition to the arsenal. Note the word arsenal. As I commented to Ripley, just as the prudent mariner does not rely on one navigation source alone, neither does the prudent writer rely on one editor (human or machine). #sailortalk

Now if I could just find a program that scans for typos that turn into real words. I can’t seem to stop typing form when I mean from. Seriously. It’s annoying.

In other news, this is form from back in April, but Colin Nissan’s The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do is among the most brutally accurate lists of writing advice I’ve read. The items themselves are the usual suspects, but the details. Ah, the details.

Enjoy!

Filed Under: News Tagged With: craft, editing

Tips For Editing Your First Novel

August 26, 2012

In some ways, writing a novel is not that dissimilar to writing a short story – you sit there, write it until it’s done, then edit it until it’s good. But the increased scope of a novel offers some challenges to the editing process that even experienced short fiction authors can find troublesome.

Proofreading and copyediting is pretty much the same, but in a long document, it’s harder to catch all of these. The eye sees what it expects to see. A spellchecker is a good start, but most won’t catch form for from or they’re/their/there problems. However, the spellchecker in Google Docs now offers some contextual corrections for errors like these. Regardless, you’ll need to go over the text several times, and I strongly recommend at least one other set of eyes just for proofreading.

You’ll need more than just technical editing, though. Novels are complex beasts and plot and characterization issues become exponentially more involved with length. Novels allow you to explore stories and characters with greater scope and depth than a short story, which can be a joy. But that latitude also gives authors enough rope to hang themselves — people behaving out of character, sub-plots taking over or disappearing, even the main plot derailing. It can be impossible to hold all the events of your story in your mind as you write, so the editing process becomes essential for working out all these tangled threads.

I’ve learned that there are a few tricks that, when employed during the initial writing phase, really smooth the editing process. I didn’t know where my weaknesses were until I’d written a few novels Editing my first novel was more of a nightmare than it had to be because I just wrote it as it came then had to go over everything from scratch. I had nothing other than the text to go by, and after a few passes I just saw what I knew should be there. Years after I “finished” the book, I still found the odd typo or error. After a bit more experience, I learned that there are some easy things you can do while working on your first draft to make editing less of a chore.

One way to help keep it all together is creating a “story bible”, where all characters, plots and other details are listed. Some authors count each time a character appears and where, to help keep track of who is important and who might be trying to usurp a more major role. Outlines can be useful here as well. I don’t tend to outline much before I start the novel, but I now keep a running synopsis of each chapter as I write it. This helps me keep track at a glance of the action and major events.

One of the other challenges that the novel’s length presents is what, in cinema, is called continuity. In long fiction, especially with many characters, this can be the most difficult part of editing. Does your character have short, brown hair in chapter 3 then mysteriously have long, blonde hair in chapter 17? Worse yet, is her name Clara in chapter 6 and Claire in chapter 10? These problems happen all the time and can be very difficult to find. Using a story bible or character sheets can help stop them before they start, but the editing process is essential to ensuring the constancy of your settings and characters.

From a technical standpoint, using the “replace all” function in your word processing software can be a godsend for situations like these. However, if you’re going to let the machine do any automatic changes for you, I highly recommend using a tool with versioning; I like Scrivener for composition but many other writing tools offer simple methods of version control. Even if you’re just using a basic word processor, you can do your own versioning by saving a copy of your draft before making any major changes.

I have learned that I have a particular problem with time. A scene can start with the sun going down and end with the sun coming up but it’s been only a few hours around noontime when the action occurs. I’ve taken to including what time and day the scene occurs in my running outline to try and head this off at the pass. It also helps me keep track of the passage of time at a simple glance at the outline, which is very helpful when working on pacing.

Not all of these methods will be useful to you; all authors develop their own bags of tricks for keeping their stories in line. And some novels cry out for different techniques than others — an epic historical fantasy might want a complete worldbuilding book while a small cast first contact story may need only a brief outline to make sense of everything. Knowing that the devil is in the details before you start writing is the most important part of preparing for editing.

Editing my first novels would have been much simpler processes had I known this then and every time I come to edit a novel now I find myself grateful to my past self for making those notes about character, setting and time that I refer to over and over again when editing.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: editing, tips, writing

A Glimpse of the Sausage Factory

August 20, 2012

Photo by Dan Patterson

Editing is among the most important part of serious writing. For new writers, or non-writers interested in the process, this article at Pankhearst is a good primer on the nuts and bolts of editing one’s own fiction.

My original description of the character Matt Adams read:

Matthew Adams was waiting inside the Benz. More bulky and even better tailored than his colleagues, Matt was head of security for Emily’s family’s firm.

I changed this to avoid my previous deliberate repetition of bulky and also to introduce Emily’s father and the fact that something has happened to him.

Matthew Adams was waiting inside the Benz. Bigger than his colleagues and even more exquisitely tailored, he had been her father’s chief of security.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: editing, writing

Editing (Unlike Math) Is Hard

March 16, 2012

One of the complaints self-publishers get is that their work isn’t well edited. Sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it’s something in between. There are plenty of ways to get a better final version (many eyes make light work), but the truth of the matter is that typos, grammar whammies and other bogglers get through. They just do.

As a fantastic example of this, I was reading crime author extraordinaire Lawrence Block‘s blog post about a pretty bad editing error he just discovered in one of his books. After the book’s been in print by several publishers for over 20 years.

I did find a few typos I’d somehow missed. Well for wall, means for meant, a word or two left out. And then, remarkably, I found this paragraph:

I nodded. “And Lynn London’s been married and divorced, and half the neighbors on Wyckoff Street have moved somewhere or other. It’s as though every wind on earth’s been busy blowing sand on top of her grave. I know Americans lead mobile lives. I read somewhere that every year twenty percent of the country changes its place of residence. Even so, it’s as though every wind on earth’s been busy blowing sand on top of her grave. It’s like digging for Troy.”

…

Could some gremlin had added it since my last reading? I checked the eBook version, and saw that I’d somehow failed to notice it in either of my two passes over the text… I studied the paragraph, and it seemed clear to me that the first wind-and-sand line was the one to cut. But why not make sure? So I went and hauled out my copy of the Arbor House hardcover first edition and checked.

And there was the full paragraph, just as I quoted it above, with both sentences about the wind blowing the sand on Barbara Ettinger’s grave. That, evidently, is how I wrote it over thirty years ago. And that’s how it’s been ever since, sailing past Jared Kieling, my editor at Arbor House, and their copy editor, and their proofreader, and everybody else who’s been involved with the book over the years.

It happens to the best of us.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: editing, writing

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A teal, purple and amber circular swirl with images of different landscapes (various futuristic cityscapes, an endless suburban street, a desert world) and flying whales. Text reading Transmentation | Transience by Darkly Lem.

Transmentation | Transience: Or, An Accession to the People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds (The Formation Saga)

From bestselling authors Darkly Lem comes Transmentation | Transience, the first book in a sweeping multiverse of adventure and intrigue perfect for fans of Jeff Vandermeer and The Expanse series.

Over thousands of years and thousands of worlds, universe-spanning societies of interdimensional travelers have arisen. Some seek to make the multiverse a better place, some seek power and glory, others knowledge, while still others simply want to write their own tale across the cosmos.

When a routine training mission goes very wrong, two competing societies are thrust into an unwanted confrontation. As intelligence officer Malculm Kilkeneade receives the blame within Burel Hird, Roamers of Tala Beinir and Shara find themselves inadvertently swept up in an assassination plot.

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Free Stories

The Interview

Originally published in Podioracket Presents - Glimpses “I was working at this stim joint, a place called Ultra-Sissons. It’s not where I’m working now — I wasn’t a bartender then, just a busser. … Read More... about The Interview

The Foreigner

I slip into the fake-leather seat, and look at my watch. I have about an hour before the shareholders' meeting, but I have to stop by the day care first, so I want to make this snappy. I've found that … Read More... about The Foreigner

Career Opportunities

Jo-Lynn had always laughed at Charlotte, her stupid sister-in-law, who believed the crap in those so-called newspapers she bought at the supermarket every week. It was no wonder that her no-good … Read More... about Career Opportunities

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