Editing

    I've done the hard part, crawled through the first draft with my hands and knees in the mud but now it's finally time to make it shine. Fleshing out those bones you laid is the fun part. First drafts are honestly kind of cringe worthy. 

    Thank goodness for spell check; I'm a terrible speller. You should see all the red lines lacing any given document of mine. What's weird is often times my attempted words won't be close enough for spell check to register but if I copy them into my search engine, it finds what I meant. 

    Dictionary.com is my other best friend. I'm always looking up definitions and synonyms. It's right there on my bookmark toolbar. If I don't know a word I'll look it up and bookmark it so I don't forget.

    The main blemishes (thank you dictionary.com) I need to weed out of my manuscript are echoed words. I can repeat the same word three times in a sentence and not notice. It happened today. There are close repeating words and further separated phrases that pop up again on different pages to watch out for.

It's a lot of work but the edited product of my labor makes it all worth it. <See how I put "it" three times there. I could rephrase the sentence "It's a lot of work but the final product is worth the labor." I'm constantly making adjustments like this.