Dangerous Day Job

Today I’ll talk about the specifics of my own process so far. That’s pretty much it. Also, reading your own book sure feels weird.

So far my process is pretty simple. I use Google Docs for my word processor and it has this great feature called suggestions. You can enter suggestion mode, make changes, comment on those changes, and then review the original text compared to the previous later and decide if that’s what you want to go with. I think this will make it easy to see exactly how much work I put into my first draft. It also has a huge benefit of allowing me to ‘kill my darlings,’ but still keep them around in case I change my mind later, or want to use them somewhere else. What’s kind of ironic about this process is that it is much closer to how someone would edit with pen and paper. It even leaves the original text crossed out for you right there in the document. If I were to directly edit the text I would lose a lot of stuff immediately, or end up with copies upon copies of my work. I don’t like having lots of different copies because the best stuff tends to get spread out among them and then I have to go back and merge and it gets complicated.

I’m a couple chapters in, and so far its going pretty well. The first one is the most heavily edited already and there aren’t many changes I need to make there. The second one is ok, but I’ve hit a stumbling block on the third one because man it is just hot garbage. I’m going to have to rewrite large sections of it to make it worthwhile to read. Should be interesting.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley