Friday Revisions: The importance of the first, complete read-through

I’ve been spitting and polishing away at A to Z Stories of Life and Death, and since it is my longest piece I’ve ever edited for publication, I learned a lesson.

It is a collection of flash fiction, so I just polished one before going on to the next, and so on and so forth. (This is against all the rules I followed while proofing/editing work by other folks. Go figure…..le sigh.)

Only at the end of the whole shebang did I do a complete read through, and of course I had made a mess of consistency issues like UK and US spellings and idioms. I also realized that I had stories that were too similar to each other, and some that did not fit the theme. Back to square one, of course.

Note to self: Do a complete read-through of any MS before you begin editing.