Editing Blue Violet

In January, The Wild Rose Press contracted Blue Violet and the Svatura series of novels. Blue Violet was my first completed book, my first self-published (or published at all) book, and my first book to win an award (or 2). It’s my baby. It started it all.

In publishing now with The Wild Rose Press, I’m enjoying revisiting the story and my characters as my editor, Mary, and I get it ready. Don’t worry Blue Violet fans, we’re not changing anything too drastically. But I thought you’d like to know what we’ve been working on.

Beginning

I’ve changed up where the story starts. Because the original version started with Ellie going to school, I got a lot of Twilight references in comments and reviews. In addition, I had a lot of back story going on. To fix that, I’m starting the story earlier, with Ellie leaving Griffin behind. I’m much happier with the beginning now. It has all the same stuff, but back story is no longer back story and it’s not starting out so Twilighty.

Three Years of Practice

After three years, 7 more books, 2 short stories, and countless workshops, I’ve learned a thing or two. It felt good to go back and smooth out some of the rougher edges of the book like head-hopping (jumping around the characters thoughts), gushing language, and an overuse of adverbs.

General Fine-Tuning

I think I’ve gotten a lot better at self-editing. I remember doing tons of rounds of edits on this, but many of those were rewriting large chunks, which just introduces more opportunities for mistakes. I’ve corrected things I’ve caught or people have told me about of the years. However, it feels really good to do some fine-tuning and really make it shine. Everything from commas, to using less ellipses (bad habit I’m better at now), to cleaning up certain sentences.

Long story, short, I’m thrilled with the changes we’ve implemented to make Blue Violet an even better book! I was very proud of it before. Now I’m glowing. We’re about to go to copy editing, so even more tightening of the little things, then it’s on to a new book cover. Can’t wait to re-release with my awesome publisher!