The Kindle As An Editing Tool

When you're an independent writer, truly independent, you tend to get creative in finding ways to save time and get the most you can out of whatever you have at your disposal.  Earlier this year I bought Myself a Kindle, mainly since Amazon's Kindle was what I knew was going to be the main avenue of getting published and available to a broader audience.  Very early on I realized that it was a great reasearch tool, and from almost day one I was using is as just that, not only putting several books on it as reasearch material, but also using the Kindle's bookmarking and highlighting features.

Then, after putting the converted files for the stories I had already published on My Kindle, so I could see what they looked like without having to buy My own work from Amazon, I had another idea come to Me.  If you could highlight reference material then you could also highlight errors in works in progress.  Kindle could be more than a reading and reasearch tool, it could be an editing tool as well.

A few days ago I finished the rough draft for A Day In The Life Of Abagail King, and as soon as I had the words "The End" written down, I converted a copy of the file and put it right on My Kindle.  Then over the course of the next few days I read over it and highlighted My mistakes, finding it a lot more convienent that trying to hunt through lines of text on My computer monitor.  I don't know.  There's something about the way things show up on the Kindle screen that makes those stupid mistakes jump right out more than when trying to track them down in Word.  Plus there was the comfort factor.  I got to relax on the couch and get the feel for My work before sending it out for publication.  I even did a little editing while taking care of some business, if you know what I mean.

Yes, if you use your Kindle as an editing tool you can do you editing almost anywhere.

With the Kindle as an editing tool I knocked out My edit, easily finding my mistakes in My Word draft and correcting them all within a matter of a couple of hours.  Plus when you use you Kindle to preview your work before publishing it you get a chance to see it the way your readers are going to see it, hopefully cutting out any unpleasant surprises.  Plus I have to admit I get a little jacked when I look at all My handiwork such as special text and pictures that make My works stand out more than anyone else's.  (If only more people were taking the opportunity to purchase them.)




A sneak peek at My About The Author Picture that will be in A Day In The Life Of Abagail King.  Yes, that's the Fortune Four hand sign, and I'm dressed in a hoodie and doing it with a little attitude as an homage to A.J. Styles and Frankie Kazarian.

 Using the Kindle to edit really sped up the process with A Day In The Life Of Abagail King, and I hope it will do more of the same in the future.  In one day I edited text and pictures for the novel, filed it with the Library Of Congress, and uploaded it to Amazon.  Now Kindle didn't help Me file the copyright, but it did save Me at least a couple of weeks work, and has made Me feel a lot more confident that a majority of simple mistakes didn't slip past Me and make it to the Kindle Edition.

Give it a try, and I think you'll agree that Kindle is a device that has more uses than you may have initially imagined.




Master Vyle



The Horrors Of Editing Part II

 

They say the first is the worst and I have to agree.  Especially in the past year I have learned that each time you have to go through and set up a file under a different format, or according to a different set of rules, the first time you try it is always the worst.  It's through that first time you learn, at least most of, the ins and outs.  Plus you figure out about 92% of what is causing you grief.  Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, I started off with the longest work I have on hand on My PC, a story I have edited, re-edited and reformatted more times that I am willing to contemplate.  Once again and even though it has only taken a little over three weeks, it has been a nightmare, the kind of self torture that anyone with OCD hates to deal with, yet endures because we want so much to strive for perfection.

After yesterday I am sure that I am about as close to perfection as I am going to get working to have Heather's Journey: The Sound Of her MASTER"S VOICE ready for e-book publication.  Sure there are a dozen or so little "dashes" in there that I have no idea where they came from or how to get rid of them.  Sure it does not have a program created Table Of Contents, but since anyone giving advice on the subject seems to be under the impression that "Everyone" is computer savy when it comes to dealing with HTML, and when I followed all their exact instructions none of  the codes worked, One can only assume there are probably 1,000's of e-books without a program driven Table Of Contents, and instead one listing the line location numbers like I painstakingly set up Myself.  Again, probably not perfect, but I think most readers can get past the flaws considering how flawed the text was during the sligltly abridged and chapter by chapter publication the novel had initially online.

So for all intents and purposed The Sound Of her MASTER'S VOICE is done, so it's all over but the screaming.  It all comes down to getting the funds to copyright and secure an ISBN number, which will hopefully be taken care of this week.  Aside from that I need to take care of cover art and a new picture of Myself to go in the about the About The Author blurb at the end.  The pictures are a couple of simple (yeah right!) things to deal with, and I should have them done and the cover edited by the weekend as well.  So if everything goes without a snag (and I am sure there will probably be some snags) the best case scenario would be that the novel will be available sometime within the next two weeks.  (I bet you thought I was going to say next week, and I was until my pessimism won out.)


So what comes next?  Well I am already beginning to get together My next project, a short story collection themed around Fungi.  I decided in the beginning that this was something I just had to do, because if someone was going to steal it and make a single dime off having it in "their" collection, then it stood to reason it would fare well in a collection of stories that were all by Me.  Again the process is made easier by the fact that I have already perhaps worked out most of the kinks of getting the first e-book ready for publication, so as with other things when it comes to the second time, I now pretty much know what to do and what not to do, hopefully saving Myself a few headaches.  Fungi will be in this collection along with three other stories and a poem, all so far unpublished.  Unpublished?  Hell, the truth is I haven't written a single one yet.  Yes, I know.  It's pretty ambitious, so for the moment I am not sure how long it will take Me to have the collection available.

 

 

Plus still to come... My BBW story collection to be made up of both previously published and original erotic BBW short stories and poetry.  After several weeks I have to admit that the title Rubenesque & Ravishing has begun to grow on Me a little less.  I will be coming up with another title, but I think I have one in mind unless someone can throw Me a very good suggestion.  This will be another work that is going to be built as it progresses, so at this time as with the Fungi collection I do not have a specific time frame.

So just stay tuned kiddies, there's still more to come!




Master Vyle



The Horrors Of Editing

 

Editing, especially editing some stories the way they are written sometimes, can sometimes be horrible and a form of self-torture and punishment.  I always knew that the next time I fully edited The Sound Of her MASTER'S VOICE it was going to be a bitch.  A few months back I had decided I was going to re-edit all the chapters to make them a little more visually arresting and easier to read on Literotica.com, but at that time I had also just finished writing the final chapters for the chapter by chapter posting and was pretty burned out on working with the story (another reason I was choosing not to begin the second novel until the summer).

So anyway, after the whole plagiarism situation came the decision that I wanted to sell the story, because if someone could steal My work and it was good enough for them to sell then why couldn't I.  So almost three weeks ago I began to reformat and re-edit the novel for a more mainstream publication.  I dove right in, not thinking about all the pain and headaches it was going to cause on day one.  Of course for the first couple of chapters it was smooth sailing, but then I got to Chapter Four and the introduction of Bored As Hell and Heather's obsession with internet chat.  Yeah, having chatroom dialogue is pretty fun, and in the beginning it was especially fun when all the chatters (some 40 at least throughout the novel) had their own specific font, font size and color, as at that time I had no thoughts on publishing to a broader audience whatsoever.

Well, posting sites and e-readers do not do pretty fonts and colors, so that was the first thing that had to go.  Of course stripping it out and replacing it was as easy as cutting and pasting.  It was just a matter of spacing things so the reader could tell who was saying what.  Near the end of the chapter by chapter posting on Lit and as I resubmitted the first few chapters to Lushstories.com I came to the decision that it would make it even easier on the reader if I underlined the chat ID of each user.  The thing is for some reason I did not save the changes for those three chat dialogue laced chapters that made it to Lush, and only the last few chapters (where there was hardly any chat dialogue) had been done with the underlining before being posted to Lit.

Uh-hu.  Acres and acres of pages and pages of chat dialogue (some 200-350 pages of it) to go through and underline the chat ID of all the users.  Oh, the fucking horror!  I would almost rather have another kidney stone removed via My urethra without being under anesthesia.

However, I suppose doing so is a labor of love.  The internet chat and the characters Heather meets through it are a major part of the story and how her journey into the BDSM lifestyle truly begins.  The number one subject that most people have commented on is how much they love those scenes because it makes it more real to them.  I know that even when the story is set, 2006 & 2007, that old school internet chat rooms and chatting were very much in their decline, however I know from writing it that it brings back a certain nostalgia.  So, despite the fact that these conversations could be condensed into what Heather sees on her screen and abridged , there is no way I am going to take them out, no matter how big of a headache they can cause.



 

 

Some would say, just get an editor, that there are many people who do it on a volunteer basis, many on Lit and Lush I know.  However I found early on that with free editing you get what you pay for, which is pretty much nothing.  So I would rather do it Myself, that labor of love I am sure a lot of people would love to have the money to say, "I've got someone who does that for me."

The good news for Me is that I am on the last chapter of Book Three: Journey Into Mystery, which has one of the longest chat sequences in the novel, and is the last major part of the book where a majority of the dialogue is in the form of chat room postings.

I know there are other writers out there who just love editing as much as I do.  Anyone want to share their editing horror stories, advice or observations?

Master Vyle