Some time at the beginning of the year I agreed to do a workshop for the upcoming Rockingham Writers Centre convention on editing. I had to provide an overview of what I would talk about and so I began to plan. I basically wrote down everything I had learnt about editing over the past ten years and especially focused on mistakes beginner writers make (I made most of them myself!) Before I knew it, I had 20,000 words written.
I decided to tidy up the manuscript and put it into some semblance of order and realized I had written a novella.
I debated for some time as to whether I should publish it. I'm far from an expert on grammar, but the structural editing stuff wasn't too bad. I finally decided that if I could have given myself a simple, easy-to-read book about editing ten years ago, I would have appreciated it. A lot of what's in the book are things I learnt slowly through reading books, blogs, and listening to podcasts and I've combined it into one place.
You might notice at the top of the cover is The Beginner Writer's Toolkit. Yes, I am planning a series of books on a similar vein covering things I wished I'd known at the beginning of my writing journey. I'm not sure which topics I will cover and I'm happy to listen to feedback if there is something you want to read about.
As yet I don't have a release date for Self-editing. It's almost finished. I'm playing around with the formatting for it as I've not formatted a non-fiction book before and they have slightly different requirements to fiction. It will definitely be out by the end of the year though.
