Eight lessons down

Wow! I’ve already done eight lessons in my editing course. Now this may not be one of those super-dooper courses that give you a certificate, but it is, indeed, helping me with my writing and my own editing.

I used to go through my works in whatever writing program I was using – Scrivener or yWriter – and then put the first-edited version into word and throw that one one screen with the Scrivener or yWriter version on the other screen and minimise every other page on both screens. Then I would take every sentence and turn them around in notepad to see if I could get them to sound better. Once that was complete, I would then put it into a tablet computer, and, coupled with the work’s notebook (usually one with a beautiful cover) and sit somewhere and go through the work page by page noting down errors and where a new scene was needed.

What I am trialling now is to open the work in word, save it as a different version and use track changes on the file itself along with a style sheet to keep track of names, spellings, how I’m noting any trademarks I might use (yes, it does happen, sometimes) and how I want numbers handled – when I switch them to numericals rather than write them out. I also keep names of places in that style sheet, too.

Now, I’m pretty sure that Scrivener can keep track of all that for me, but this is great practice for me because I’m a plantser. Let me explain that in another post.

But now I have an issue. Yesterday I started a new DnD game with a group of new people. And I’ve told myself that I need to write up a background to my new character – even though, like my characters in my stories, my DnD character evolve as we go. Because this is good practice for me in my character creation in my novels. Although I don’t necessarily have to have their background already created (after all, my characters don’t usually exist until they’re suddenly in the book) when I first mention them, I do, at some point, need to write down some information relating to them.

So, excuse me while I go and write a background to my new DnD character.