Adventures in Editing

Two months ago, I sat at my keyboard and cried when I typed THE END to Uncrowned Heir.

What an unexpected journey it has been to put Kaia’s story into the world. She now lives in my head and generally makes snarky comments during meetings, Zoom calls, and she tries occasionally to insert herself into work emails.

Very bad Kaia.

Since then I have been working every day on line edits. As a debut indie author, the budget is very slim so line editing - at least the lion’s share of it falls to me to do. I about fell over when the Find in Microsoft Word informed me that I’ve used the word ‘just’ 483 times! And ‘look’ with all its variations was no better. So my little notebook followed me across Europe this summer while my husband and I were on holiday. Editing in the hotel in Istanbul, in the Observation Lounge on the cruise ship heading to Santorini. By the way, that was the time I lost internet connection, had about 3 hours worth of edits on my laptop and no access to cloud backup. Hubby scrambled for alternative methods to protect the book. He even suggested saving a copy in our camera’s memory disk! (I really love that man.)

As the first entry of what I hope will be many, many others, I welcome you to my tiny corner of the Internet and into the world of Riverset. Kaia, Riven and the rest of the gang will be here actively contributing their files/folders/dossiers and opinions on a frequent basis.

—J