We are already halfway through January and I am wondering where the time has gone! Years ago, I stopped making new year resolutions. Relief, because if I hadn’t, writing a weekly blog post would have been on it and that would have been a complete fail!

I know what I want to achieve, I just need better time management skills for those self-imposed tasks. The ones I agree to do for others always get completed, and normally ahead of time.

What to write about is something that always nags at me, the ideas seem to flow 30 seconds after I’ve got into bed. Yet, if I reach for a notebook or the phone to record the idea, it vanishes faster than smoke in the wind.

Enter the dictaphone. Set to auto record, it effectively captured everything. That is… snoring and random snippets of dreams when they became vocal. However, the normally ever-present ideas failed to materialise. My mind, subconsciously aware of the device, decided this was not to be. Now, I am rooting for the technology that turns thought into text, I have been since it first hit the news in 2015.

So what have I been doing this year? Editing, editing and yet more editing. The current work in progress is going through a major overhaul. An epic sci-fi/fantasy story takes time, even more if it’s co-written like this one is. After an in-depth discussion about a characters intro, I sought feedback from fellow writers on a Facebook group (13 Steps to Evil).

The comments were positive and for that discussion at least, in my favour. Unexpectedly, I received detailed constructive feedback from two of the reviewers. The book will be better for it, but damn, it is time consuming!

Back to the editing. Time to tackle the last third while my co-writer, Ray, reviews, revises or adds to chapters 11 to 20. There is something to be said for editing as you write. It takes longer initially, but the back end edit would be faster.

Do you edit as you write or after you have written the first draft?