Life after CampNaNo - 'the end'

Today, I wrote my two favourite words on a draft one manuscript. I love that moment - I wish I could bottle it like perfume to enjoy, when needed.

The next stage, structural edits aren't my favourite part of the job, so I do anything to make the task easier. My first step, is to tidy up my manuscript ensuring that the chapters match with my excel spreadsheet. It seems a pointless task but I've learnt from experience to check the sequences before I start slicing, dicing and moving anything. I rely heavily on my chapter spreadsheet to provide an overview; locating a chapter on a colour coded spreadsheet is so much easier than wading through a wordy document. 

Structural edits literally are checking the building blocks of a story, without loop holes and whopping gaps. If not, then you need to slice and dice from elsewhere or fill with new writing - which hurts as hell when you have to break up certain scene, sequences or plot points. I personally hate it, because once you start analysing you see the errors which weren't apparent during plotting or writing. Fixing them feels like the equivalent of knocking the front wall out of a newly-built house because you forget to include a staircase whilst building!

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