Editing and Miscellaneous other things

Here I am again, late at night, writing a blog post and trying to get a newsletter out because I want to, at the very minimum, post on the 23rd of every month until my book comes out.

So as the last hours of the 23rd of October slip by, let's hear it for achieving the bare minimum!

But that bare minimum included some major progress on a number of different fronts. Read on for more!

I honestly do not have much time to dedicate to my novel. I wish I did, but really the novel comes a distant fourth in my list of priorities behind work, sleeping, and family responsibilities. It kills me that family isn't #1 on my list, and it really kills me that advocacy for Palestine is ranking dead last right now.

But life is demanding, and I am very well aware that the choices I'm faced with are nothing compared to the impossible situations so many other people around the world are forced to endure. I still took out some time to protest for Palestine on the seventh of October, and I am working on a script for a video that I want to post which Inshallah will be the next thing I work on. But in the meanwhile I had some deadlines to hit for the novel and I hit them!

By now I have read my novel cover to cover about six and a half times over the last few months while working with editors. It would have been seven, but I just ran out of time. I can say though that with each pass the number of changes have dropped like a rock and by the last round I was just making tweaks.

I have the copy edit editing passes to do, which I am very excited about as that will be the first time that the novel will actually look like a full book, and then that portion of the writing journey will have come to an end. While I'm tired of reading the novel over and over again, I'm looking forward to making in 7.5 reads. That I'm not completely sick of it yet gives me hope that future readers will enjoy going through it once. That's the goal and it makes all the cut words worth it.

I have to say that while it was rough, especially at the start, I truly enjoyed the process of editing. I think it might have a lot to do with being lucky enough to have had two amazing editors. It is a source of deep gratification to have someone read the novel deeply and offer feedback and that is exactly what good editors do. I will always be indebted to both Julia and Shannon for all they have done for the novel and for being not just good, but excellent.

There were other things to do for the novel that I was able to wrap up, for example I was asked to write a synopsis, and character descriptions for the main characters, and I turned those in as well.

The synopsis was actually pretty easy as I wrote one while I was searching for an agent or a publisher for the novel. Maybe someday I will have time to delve into what that process was like. The character descriptions were a brand new thing for me though. It was a fun experience actually to summarize the novel in a different way and truly think about who the major character were in the novel and summarize their entire beings into a few sentences. Writing truly is an odd experience sometimes.

These steps are where I am transitioning from the editing phase of publishing the novel, to the marketing phase, as these materials will be used by the sales and marketing departments. And the biggest part of that has been going to get author pictures done. Please check out one of the results on the About Page of this site!

The photographer, Laila Kazmi of Kazmiimages, is a family friend and I am truly blessed to have such a strong support system that I can rely on. I'm not comfortable with putting myself out there visually but she brought out the best side of me I think and I can't help but be grateful.

As I worked on updating the site, I realized I had to rewrite portions of it to be more focused on the upcoming book rather than feel like an author's personal blogsite. I hope I've taken positive steps towards that end, but I know it'll take some iteration to get there, I hope that I'll have the chance to do so. Throwing together a quick mock cover on Canva was a part of it, I'm hoping to be able to put up the real cover really really soon!

In other news, my other writing project, a tabletop roleplaying game supplement, is also coming to a conclusion, it's about 40k words of extremely nerdy writing that I went through and edited the almost complete pdf of. It's odd to be be able to indulge in my hobbies at a time where there's so much else going on, but it's a pleasure to be overwhelmed with projects of my own choosing and to be able to complete my responsibilities to them in a timely manner.

I hope the next month will be slower than this one, but how November turns out isn't up to me, it's up to God and I can only trust that he knows what's best for all of us.

Until next time!