I’ve been extremely occupied with edits for my second novel, “Nothing Ventured,” this week. And I thought there was no creativity left in my overworked brain to pour into the old entrepreneurial arsenal. Thoughts of Mia and Chris incessantly swarm my mind and my sole focus is to finesse their love story to the satisfaction of my editor. In fact, I think I’ve dreamed in italicized subtitles for the past few nights.
I didn’t think I had anything left.
But then I came up with..ta-da!!!! An idea.
In my past life, like a waaaaay long time ago, I was responsible for putting together business requirements for system development projects. Of course there were endless Microsoft Word doc templates available for this exercise, with tables of contents so long they’d rival the length of the actual document.
I’m exaggerating. Kind of. =)
But then software packages were developed to simplify the process and analysts could input their requirements into a program and answer a whole slew of questions that would translate into a section of the overall deliverable. The software package would tie all the components together and take the work out of building the narrative. Analysts input the pertinent information, the software does the rest.
Not that I’m suggesting authors write books with this type of software but think about applying this concept to the editing process. Developmental edits are a huge pain. If an author needs to move chunks of a manuscript around, it becomes very tedious to track all the downstream changes. Plus, sometimes an author may want to “test” a scene out in a different location but wants to see how it might impact the overall story WITHOUT messing everything up.
A software package that could help with this process would be super useful. Instead, authors (read: ME) end up saving multiple versions of the manuscript, trying to test out various scenarios and often forgetting which one is the gold copy. To mitigate the risk of THAT, my titles are normally something like this…
NothingVentured v1.12.3.4 ChrisGetsDrunkMiaGoesOverboard.docx
Not confusing at all, right?