Editing Part of the Sequel to Infused

Over the past week I have spent time editing the first five chapters of the sequel to Infused. Mainly I was looking at sentence structure and the flow of the wording.

When I write I will sometimes drop out a word or two while I am typing in the rush to get the sentence written, so this was the most basic thing that I was looking to clean up (as well as other typos).
 I also read each sentence individually to ensure that they are not confusing and that what I am trying to say comes across. This is the main cause of additional verbiage being added during editing. In total I added about four hundred words across these five chapters while editing them.
One other thing that I pay close attention to while editing is the repetitive use of words across multiple sentences. For instance, in one section I found that I used the words "used to" three times in two adjoining sentences, so I found alternatives for two of them.

A friend of mine that edits for a living helped perform a final edit of Infused for me. Seeing the changes that she suggested has helped me to write from the beginning on this novel using some of those guidelines, so editing will be less of an effort. However, for some of the standards that she used I will wait until the book is completed and ready for final formatting. An example of this is adding spaces to ellipsis, so "..." will become " . . .". Those types of changes will be easier to do en masse, (since the process will only have to be done once instead of multiple times).

Making Progress

It's been a hectic few weeks. I've had to work late a good bit at my daytime job on a project and I was tied up with designing the lighting for a local community play in the evenings for a week. I usually end up designing lights for three or four plays a year. I have also worked on set construction a number of times and I have even helped sew costumes.

Even with all of these "distractions" I have managed to get some writing completed for the sequel to Infused. I am now up to over 13,000 words. I still have a long way to go; so far I've really only (mostly) completed the introduction to the setting. Soon I'll get into the actual story and we'll see where it goes from there.

A little over a week ago I added some information about myself and Infused to GoodReads.com. I had not realized that the book had been listed there since May of last year (with barely more than the name presented), but now the cover can be seen and there is also a brief insight into the story that I wrote. Also included is an automatic link to this blog.