Writing Book 13: The End (Again)

 

Earlier this month, I set out my five main writing goals for the year - and I've managed to cross off the first item on my list: Draft Two of Book 13

I was happy with the structure of the book after the first draft, so I've spent the past few weeks polishing the manuscript - cutting unnecessary bits, adding necessary bits, tidying clunky sentences, making sure there's a nice flow and ensuring I hadn't accidentally changed somebody's name part-way through.

Once I was happy with the draft, I went back to the beginning and read through the whole book again, using Word's Read Aloud function, which helped me to pick up on a lot of little errors that I'd missed during previous drafts and read-throughs. You wouldn't believe the amount of 'the', 'a' and 'of's that were missing, or the uses of 'him' instead of 'his', and don't get me started me on the amount of repeated words (how did I miss those???)

So, I'm happy with the story and the structure, and the manuscript is as clean as I can make it. Which means it's time for the book to meet another set of eyes. And that is the scariest bit of all.