As many of you know, I’m spending most of my waking hours editing, editing, and more editing my second novel, THE RIGHT & THE REAL. Yesterday, I finished the first slog through with my editor’s fantastic notes. I still have a lot of polishing and probably some cutting to do, but I wanted to see if I’d managed to accomplish something she’d stressed over and over in her editorial letter. She wanted me to make sure that my plot threads were woven throughout the book, and were not just dropped in sporadically whenever I remembered them. For example, one character showed up at the beginning and the end when I needed him again, but nowhere in the middle. It left the reader with the feeling of, “Who’s Josh?”

So, what I did after finishing the draft yesterday was I used Word to go through and highlight each plot line in a different colour. Then I shrunk the manuscript down to 5 point and removed all the spaces. That allowed me to print my entire manuscript on 34 pages. Then I laid it down on the floor to see how the plot lines looked. I got the idea of shrinking it down from Darcy Pattison, but highlighting it in Word while it was still full size was my idea. You do have to have a colour printer, which we didn’t until recently. And I guess it uses a lot of ink, but who cares? It’s so useful! Highlighting a small printout with actual pens makes my eyeballs pop out of my head, so this was so much better. Anyway, below is my entire book. If you have really good eyes, you can read it more than a year before it comes out!