I finished editing of my upcoming short novel, By Darkness Revealed, a few days ago. But I just finished actually adding those edits into the computer document today. And that disconnect in time – heck, plus the number of hours I spent laboriously making all those edit changes – has had me wondering if I should rethink my method.
This run, I printed the book out and took pen to paper copy in order to do the edits. That meant going back in and typing all those changes in. On the plus side, this actually gave me another look over the whole novel, and I caught a couple more (small) changes I wanted to make. On the down side, it took an awful lot of time for not a lot of return. 😉
But I do feel like reading the story in a paper format after writing it on the computer gives me a different perspective. I\’m not sure how valuable that difference is, yet, but it\’s there. So I\’m not sure I want to go to editing on the keyboard. I\’m not sure I\’d get as much out of the process.
All of this of course is making me wish I had an iPad. Or some sort of nice tablet. =) Maybe an android based one. What I\’d like? Well, seeing the writing on a tablet just makes sense, since that is the format an increasing number of people will be viewing it on. And being able to read in that format, and edit when I run into a bad spot, it pretty ideal. Do it right there, on the fly.
Of course I just bought the new laptop, and it\’s perfectly fine for my writing and surfing work. No problems at all. But I could definitely see myself getting a tablet at some point here for editing, to smooth the integration between edit and writing.