Final Revision: Editors Comments

I spent about the last three weeks doing a very deep slow edit of my collection. Addressing the editor’s comments and adding my own. This was the hardest job of editing I’ve ever done. Eleven of the fourteen stories needed the most work. I was amazed at the things I and the editor had missed in prior revisions.

1.Dialogue attributes: the editor added numerous attributes throughout the MS like: whined, ordered, notified, and called. Most were deleted, to others I added character actions.

2.Logistics: the flow of scenes and characters among the scenes. Because some scenes were deleted, moved or revised this was an area I took a hard look at. The short story by its nature is dynamic. Depending on the change the entire dynamic of the story can change.

3.New scenes and dialogue.

4.Cleaning up wordiness, passive sentences and overused words like that, just, really, etc.

5.Endings. Two of the stories had new endings as a result of the movement of scenes or new scenes.

6. Inconsistencies throughout the MS.

I used both the Grammarly and ProWrite programs as part of the editorial process.