Editing, Editing, Editing

  Guess what I've been doing this week!
  No, go on, guess.
  It begins with E.

  So! I've gotten around half of His Darkest Desire edited to what's hopefully a much better standard than its original incarnation. It's actually been a very interesting experience going through the chapters one by one and observing how my editing improved over the span of those last couple of months at the end of 2012. I haven't been doing any big rewrites or cutting and adding any new scenes, but there have been a whole heap of paragraph tweaks, grammar corrections, and sentence re-jiggerings. I've also been working to iron out some of the passive voice and nail down the tone of the first few chapters a little better. There were several moments, in parts one and two particularly, where the hero came across as less domineering than I'd intended, or somewhat detached and unattractive due to my choice of wording and description.

  It's always a curious thing to go back to your old work and read through it again, and I have to confess that, like a lot of writers, I often dread doing so. I tell myself that my writing was so awful back then I'll be horribly embarrassed to return to it. I imagine the process of editing being so gruelling that I'll give up and be unable to continue, and I put it off for as long as possible.
  But, as always, it's nowhere near as bad as you expect. I actually appreciate my old work a lot more when I return to it months or years down the line and look at it with a fresh perspective. There are almost always a host of technical problems or niggling issues that I've since improved upon, but the basic story being told and the scenes themselves are usually still something I'm happy with.
  As a simple, sexy fantasy about being drawn into the world of BDSM by a domineering millionaire, I think that first serial novel of mine is pretty darn decent overall.

  All of this editing is of course designed to get the story ready for publication as a standalone novel, which should hopefully happen some time within the next couple of weeks. Each chapter is getting re-uploaded to Amazon and Smashwords as soon as I'm done with it, so if you've purchased them already you should be able to access the polished up versions for free. Chapters 1-5 are currently done, and I hope to have 6-9 finished by this time next week. Then it'll just be a case of gluing them all together, formatting the whole thing, getting a cover done, and His Darkest Desire: The Complete Collection (working title) should be ready to go!

  Wild Instincts is of course on hold while I focus on getting this project out of the way, but I'll be continuing with it as soon as possible!