Preparing for July and beyond (aka Editing Plans)

I've been preparing for the edit of "The Sundered Light" in July today. While I won't be starting the actual editing until July 1st there's plenty I can do to be ready.

So far I have:

1. Printed out the first 104 pages of the Manuscript ready for Wednesday. This is a short novel at 61k and that's nearly half of it.
2. Located my red pens and a couple of folders to use.
3. Tried and failed to locate my highlighters. I'll have to buy some - which likely means on Thursday with the hours I work.
4. Realised an entire scene was missing from Chapter 18 and added it from the notebook. I won't get to chapter 18 until late July/early August, so it'll have time to rest anyway.

What I intend to do in July and early August is spend two or three days on each chapter. The first day I will check that everything is coherent and change anything that needs changing to fit. Then the next day I will go through the chapter using the checklists from "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" to spot and correct problems. I expect this to take a day or so depending on the length of the chapter and the number of problems I find.

I hope that by doing this I will - by mid-August - have a much stronger manuscript. It can then rest again until October when I plan to use the exercises from the "Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook" to strengthen it some more. Then it can rest while I do NaNoWriMo in November before I go over it with the Self-Editing checklists again to check the stuff I added during October.

In early 2010 I'll be looking for critical readers. Volunteers welcome - even at this early stage.