I’ve talked in the past about the numerous edits that take place for a story. You write the manuscript and then you go through it again and clean it up. It goes out to beta readers who give you their opinions and then it’s off to your editor. For me, that normally means a developmental readthrough and then what I like to call the ‘bloody edit’ followed by line edits, and finally the proof read. Wow – sounds exhausting, right?
One of the edits that I don’t talk about a lot is what I call the ‘do you like it edit’. And that can be a hard one. And it can happen more than once. For me, I spend so much time on edits that inevitably the story and I change along the way. I have to read the story through and ask myself do I still like it?
Right now, I’m reading a story I’ve been working on. It hasn’t even started the laundry list of edits above, but that’s okay. I’m reading it to see if I like it enough to go through the steps.
It’s a bit surreal reading your own stories. Sometimes you get bogged down in minutia, but other times you read along and think – ‘that’s good, did I write that?’ That is where I like to land. It might take multiple edits to get there, but I want my readers to enjoy the story as much as I do in the end.
AE Jones 
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