Rich Chesler finished up his part of Red Ice and sent it back to me for my final go through. So, The Assassin Prince outlining has been put aside as I go through Red Ice. It should be simple and straightforward, right? Just read through it again, stamp my approval and send it back, done in a day, right?
Er....Not exactly.
One piece of advice I have always heard that once you finish a story, you set it aside for a period of time before you go back and edit it. This is so you can see the story with fresh eyes and find things you would otherwise miss. It's been a while since I read through Red Ice, and my read through now is. . . .humbling.
I have found so many minor and a couple of less minor mistakes in the first four chapters that it stunned me. Things like missing possessives, wrong tense, extra spaces, missing commas or dashes. In less minor mistakes, I wrote a scene about meeting of four people with five people speaking, and having people smile or scowl while wearing industrial-grade dust masks!
I doubt there are any major plot problems, or Rick would have pointed them out. But this isn't going to be done in a day or two. If the rest of the novel is as error-filled, it's going to take a few more days of reading every line, testing them, and noting changes. Making sure everything is as near perfect as I can make it.
One of the reviews for African Firestorm said the following:
A fun easy beach read need to be more careful about misspellings, bad grammar. And duplicated words in same sentence. Tighter editing.
Mind you, the reviewer did give it four out of five stars, so the clearly liked it. And to be fair, I didn't do such an intense scrutiny of African Firestorm as I'm doing this time with Red Ice. And the reviews have been great for African Firestorm -- 4.7 Stars out of 5 --- but for some reason, that short, mildly critical review is the one that's stuck with me. So, maybe I'm a lot more critical with Red Ice than I would be otherwise. To the reviewer, if you ever read this, thank you for reminding me that an author's job isn't over when they write the last word of the story -- it is only half the job.
Now, I need to get back to Red Ice.....
If you haven't read African Firestorm, it's on Amazon, but NOT part of the Kindle Direct program (I was wrong about that....) but is part the Kindle Unlimited Program, and is free to Amazon Prime members -- African Firestorm on Amazon For those living in the UK, please click here
Craig
(The last paragraph has been edited several times in the last ten minutes, due to my incompetence. Will try better next time....)
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