Well I have updated my Prohibition Era story online to include the changes I’ve made for the second draft so far. There’s still a ways to go but the first set of changes are big and ripple throughout the rest of the work.
For the most part this story has been written in a linear fashion. Not just the timeline of the story but from chapter to chapter. The main exception being that the first part of the story I started with is Chapter 3. What this really means though, is that while Chapter 3 may be older than the Prologue and/or Chapter 1, that Chapter 10 is much newer. This work has been in progress since 1984 after all.
What does that mean and why am I typing about it now? Well the newer parts of the book have the benefit of being written after I learned whatever skills I have learned about writing. The first parts had a less mature, less talented, less savvy author working on them. This update really goes back and tweaks some of that in a major way.
The real reason I’ve been able to improve this story so drastically is that I have been working with a writing coach, Edee “BossLady” Lemonier, who will also be my editor when I get it to the point she can edit. As an editor she makes sure I got the right words, but as a coach she helps me make sure I got the words right. Part of the hope is that she doesn’t correct that more colloquial usage of the word ‘got’ because of the parallelism it provides for the second part of the phrase. Then again it’s part of what she’s coaching me on.
Now, she doesn’t edit my blog, so don’t take any grammatical errors on this page to mean she isn’t good at what she does. I wholeheartedly suggest that anyone else who writes look her up if you need help with your writing. You will not be disappointed.