Blood from Your Own Pen A Practical Guide on Self-Editing and Common Mistakes for Beginning Authors Who Intend to Survive to Publication.

Sometimes there are little things you didn't know about that can change everything, and that's why I decided to write this guide. It is a compilation of things that have taken me sixteen years to learn, and I am going to give you the chance to learn it all in sixty minutes! Yay! Talk about a return in time investment! Hmmm... That's a great tag line. I think I'm going to put it on the back cover. The insights collected throughout this book are all things I wish I could have had in a book, in my hand, the day I decided I was finally going to put my butt in the chair and write a novel. Having this would have moved my learning curve up by years. Literally. So many of these were mistakes I made over and over again until some kind soul finally pointed it out, or until I had seen it (and hated it) in enough other authors' stories to finally recognize it in my own. Before you pay an editor to bleed red all over your manuscript with their pen, grab hold of as many of these rules as you can and squeeze them until the metaphorical blood drips from your imaginary fist. Use it to fill your own red pen and then go bleed red on your story first. You will get more benefit, and learn more, from an editor who doesn't have to correct these kinds of mistakes for you. And it will cost you less in the long run. You will never find anyone else in the writing world whose blood is less precious or expensive than your own.