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7 Little Marks Is Off to the Proofreader

Fee Writes

From editing to the proofreader, will my patience endure?

Pull the cork out of the wine bottle, pour a glass and celebrate with me! 7 Little Marks, the second Agatha Carroway story, is finally heading for the proofreader.

And I do mean finally.

To say it’s taken some time to write would be something of an understatement. The funny thing is, the actual writing often feels like the easy part. Once Agatha and George get themselves involved in a mystery, they have an irritating habit of carrying me along with them.

It’s the editing that takes the time.

And the editing.

And then just a little more editing.

But it is worth every minute, because this is where I start discovering all those little things that slipped past me while I was happily concentrating on murder, motives and suspicious behaviour.

There are the moments when I stop and think, Darn, I’m sure I’ve already written about that. Or I suddenly realise, No, I can’t say that here — it practically introduces the murderer three chapters too early.

Then there are repeated words, characters who apparently move from one side of a room to the other without actually crossing it, and the occasional sentence that seemed perfectly sensible when I wrote it but looks decidedly peculiar a week later.

Thank goodness for spellcheck. And, perhaps even more importantly, thank goodness for Command/F in a Word document. If you don’t know what that is, well, it’s a wee tool to help you find something.

Then, of course, there’s AI.

I use ChatGPT, and it has made parts of the editing process considerably easier.

One of the advantages is being able to put the entire manuscript in front of Chat and ask it to look for things I may have missed — repeated descriptions, words used too close together, inconsistencies, or places where something simply doesn’t quite work.

It doesn’t replace my editing. Far from it. I still make the decisions because they are my characters, my story and my writing style. But having another pair of very fast digital eyes available is incredibly useful and time-saving. Especially digital eyes that don’t get tired after reading the same chapter for the sixth time.

Then Comes the Cover!

One of my favourite parts of producing a book is creating the cover. By the time I reach that stage, the story that has existed in my head for months suddenly begins to look like a real book.

For 7 Little Marks, I wanted the cover to capture one of the important settings in the story — a gentleman’s dressing room in the 1930s.

AI helped me create the dressing-room scene, and then I took the image into Canva where I added Agatha, the title and all the other elements needed for the finished cover.

There is something wonderfully satisfying about watching all those separate pieces come together. Naturally, I fiddled with them. Moved things. Changed things. Moved them back again. And finally decided the first version had probably been better after all.

Such is the glamorous life of an independent author.

And Now We Wait…

Because the manuscript had now reached the stage where I needed to stop tinkering with it. In all fairness, that may actually be the hardest part. So finally I sent it heading off to my proofreader, where someone other than me will finally read it with a fresh pair of eyes and, no doubt, discover a few things that have been sitting there quite happily under my nose.

Can I display a degree of patience while I await the verdict? Patience, of course, being one of those virtues that sounds much easier in theory.

But 7 Little Marks is one step closer to publication, and that definitely deserves a glass of wine.

As for what I’ll do while I’m waiting?

Well…

There’s always another adventure for Agatha and George to develop.

And, funnily enough, I may already have one in mind.