Josh Jackson Author

My current project is basically finished! It was about a six-month process, mainly in editing. I have no editor, so it’s all on me.

I’m very happy to have reached the finish line. It was a wild ride, and I can honestly say I’ve never spent as much time on any written work in my life. And it’s only a novella!

My editing process is simple, but time-consuming. Since I publish eBooks, my read-throughs are always done on my phone. I convert the document to .epub and use an eBook reader. That way what I’m experiencing mirrors what the reader will experience. I take notes in a small notebook. Then wait until the next day to do a round of edits based on the notes.

So I’ve read my work dozens of times through. That means just this project alone has seen me read upward of a million words, over and over. I knew I’d definitely reached the finish when I started having lines and dialogue from the story pop into my head randomly. And it’s amazing, you can read your own work ten, twenty, thirty times and never notice a glaring typo. In the first line!

I’ve now spent so much time with the characters that I actually started to feel for them as if they were actual people. I have real empathy for them. And I’m going to miss them, I think. But it’s time. Time to wrap it up, publish, and move on to the next.

I actually reached the point where I’m sick of this story. I mean, I love it, it’s great, and I’m so very happy with it, but you can’t eat cake every meal. You’ll start to hate cake.

I plan to let it sit and gel over the weekend and do one final read-through just in case I missed one little detail. Then lay it out and send it for publication next week. Yay! It’s finally done!

And the next project. It’s a full-size novel, which would be my first. Thankfully I’ve gotten the first draft completed, so all that’s left is the editing. But being twice the length of my current project, it’s a daunting amount of work. It took six months to bring the current one to market. I can’t imagine the novel publishing any time sooner than this fall or winter.

That’s fine. I’ve got a lot of other irons in the fire, and I’d much rather be busy than bored!

So stay tuned, I’ll announce the official publication of the new project here in the coming weeks.

And thanks for reading!