This is K.M. Wyland and you're listening to the 448 episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors

podcast. My first full edit of a book after completing the first draft is usually focused

primarily on tightening word count. I've talked before about my approach to this, how I will run a series of find replaces throughout the manuscript to put suspect words or phrases all in caps, making it easy for

me to spot and evaluate their necessity as I'm reading through.

As I go, I'm also lying in content editing, but with my extensive list of find replace words,

it gets pretty attention intensive deleting half those words and retyping the other half. I bet I end up

retyping at least a full third of the manuscript. So this edit, which I'm

currently doing on my portal fantasy sequel Dreambreaker isn't focused on line editing as much as the next edit will be.

And I'm almost ready for that second edit.

I have only a few more climactic chapters to go on this edit which is exciting.

It ended up being a lengthy edit since I moved right in the middle of it and took almost a month off.

I can't wait to finish these initial edits so I can start on the outline for the third and final book in the trilogy.

And by the way, if you're interested in my list of suspect words, you can find it by searching for the

podcast and post I did two years ago on five ways to trim your book's word count. In other news, today's podcast is sponsored by

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my books, both my fiction and my non-fiction. So we'll do it. You're in a

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