My Editing Process
I’ve spent a lot of time the last few weeks editing, re-editing… and more editing. I started Nightwind: Fury without caring about word counts. But when I finished 31 chapters, I was at 205,000 words. Too many for a first novel. So I’m setting about removing 1/3 of the words, trying to get under 140k. I like the chapters, so I’ve tried to remove superfluous words — like adjectives or redundant statements.
I love editing though. Re-reading my concise text where every word is carefully measured is quite pleasurable and satisfying. The story flows faster and smoothly, and I hope this translates to a great reading experience.
I can edit about 5000 words a day. I use a lot of dictionary.com, thesaurus.com, as well as using ChatGPT when I have a difficult paragraph and writers block. It’s great at providing 10 condensed variants of a snippet that I can pick from and tweak to my liking.
Speaking of ChatGPT, it’s also super useful for ideation. Like a real assistant, just ask it to do some research and it’s happy to give you whatever you ask. Describe loosely what you want and where to get inspiration from, and it will give you all kinds of suggestions. I frequently draw on mythology from cultures around the world. It’s great at aggregating an idea into a number of options based on mythologies. Things that would take me hours, it can do in a few minutes.
That’s all for now. Bye!
Software engineer and author
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