The process of editing my manuscript

As I said in previous posts, I’ve been writing a lot this year. I feel very creative, tremendously inspired.

The visions are becoming more detailed and stronger. As the world unfolds, it inspires me more and more. Ideas come to my mind all day long, and I write them down.

All I need is to sit in front of FocusWriter, in the dark, to start writing.

I have Book 2 of Caverns and Dryads already written, and I’m editing it.

After that, I’ll write more parts of Book 1. It needs more detail, a lot of editing, and some rewriting. I don’t know if I’ll edit the story that’s already included in the game. I’ll probably leave it as it is in the game, but expand it in the book.

In the game you can’t go into such depth, and things like descriptions are often already conveyed by the images themselves.

Trying a retro effect on one of Tamzyn's photoreal images. Tamzyn in another world.

THE EDITING PROCESS

When you finish writing a book, there are usually many mistakes. Each person can use whatever method they prefer to edit and fix everything.

Many go to a professional editor who does it for them. For that you need: a lot of money, and very little desire to do it yourself.

As someone who has always written (poems, short stories), and who doesn’t have that money and does have the desire of controlling every step, I’m going to do it myself.

This is usually discouraged because you may get used to what you wrote and skip mistakes.

I have one advantage: my terrible memory. Since I don’t remember the last time I read it, I pay more attention in the moment. That helps me detect those mistakes.

I use to take lots of notes. I look at them for the story. In other things that are not writing, I don't depend on my memory, and do everything from scratch. But often, for saving time, I check my notes.

STAGES

The first thing is the inspiration of the muses. I write and write as I already told you. It’s the mental image that is inspired. The word is a rational effort to show it to you. 

While I write, I only think about being understood and letting you see what I see. That’s one of the reasons I write in third person, present tense. You and I witness what is happening right now.

After that come several waves of revision.

SPELLING

While I write and narrate, I try not to make spelling or grammar mistakes.

I find it absurd when people advise leaving that for the end. Back in when I was a student, I would already fail an assignment if I made one or two spelling mistakes. So I got used to avoid that.

Besides, the integrated dictionary in any writing application is usually enough to check if you’ve made any spelling mistakes.

READING ALOUD

I use Balabolka, an old text‑to‑speech software, together with FocusWriter. Also the voice reader on my phone.

I simply play the text and change whatever is hard to understand or sounds wrong. It also helps detect grammatical errors, repeated words, and many other issues.

PUNCTUATION REVIEW

This is to avoid things like unclosed punctuation marks, commas that are missing or unnecessary, periods stuck to the next word…

Careful reading helps find these mistakes, this time without voice. Curiously, for this it helps to copy your book to a Kindle or another reader, to see it in a different color and font.

The reason is that otherwise you don’t perceive the mistakes easily, because your mind has gotten used to not seeing them.

USE OF LLMs

LLMs like ChatGPT or online AI tools can help detect grammatical or punctuation errors. You can ask them about orthography, synonyms, or doubts, or ask to scan a text in search for a missing comma. Tools for this existed in computers before this technology.

But they have these unexpected problems:

• They often overlook mistakes.
• Sometimes they don’t understand the narrative situations and may confuse words that are correctly written.

So they don’t replace your own revision. At most they can provide an extra pass of detection. But careful reading in several waves, done by yourself, is indispensable.

Something very important: writing advice and suggested edits from LLMs are always disastrous. Never write with AI. Never change your sentences to suit them. That worsens expression and makes the text lose strength.

This includes that even if you show them a part of your text, do the fix yourself. Because they may change or alter the text and ruin it. People hate texts wrtiten by LLMs for a reason. They are not good and never will. 

To write a story you need human experience. It cannot be replaced in any way.

FINAL READING

When you think everything is correct, you read it all again. Then you may feel that something needs improvement.

Every work can be improved until the author’s death. But without going to that extreme, you can evaluate whether what you feel while reading expresses what you wanted to communicate.

ALPHA READER AND NEXT STEPS

Now the book goes to my alpha reader, whom I trust.

After that I’ll adapt it to the game. I’ll register it at my country’s intellectual property office, and implement it in my game (Caverns and Dryads on Steam).

Since Books 1 and 2 will actually go together in a single physical or electronic volume, I’ll have to wait. When I have Book 1 fully finished, I’ll probably announce that I’m looking for beta readers.

Book 1 is already in the game. But as a novel, the story needs to be expanded, detailed, and improved.

I hope to find those beta readers among the players and also among people drawn to the world I describe.

I will also translate from Spanish to English and review it all again so the sense, rhythm and everything is not lost in translation.

We’ll talk about that when the time comes. Thank you for reading!