Most writers and editors will understand that phrasing…story blindness. It comes around when you’ve read, edited, re-edited, proofed, re-proofed, and gone over the same story for the tenth to twentieth time.
Edits for me are fun and enjoyable. For authors they can be the bain of the publishing process. At MuseItUp Publishing all books go through a content editor – multiple times; a line editor – multiple times; galley and final galley. A fast push may see your book published within six months. We won’t rush the process.
No one can edit their own work. It just doesn’t work that way for any published piece. Why? Because we do become blind to the words. We stop seeing what’s missing and fill in story gaps in our minds because we know the story. It takes beta readers and editors to catch these missing pieces and to anticipate our writing habits. Like starting every other sentence with ‘but’ or over pronoun/name use.
Why mention this while visiting Victoria Ley’s Darkseed: Awakening? Because she trusted me enough to tell me she was sick of seeing my edits 🙂 Now trust me…this is one story you won’t get story blindness from 🙂
The dead wants company. Hers.
Back Cover:
205 Cheyne Avenue holds some dark secrets…
After an accident claims the lives of two boys, fifteen year old Sarah Walton moves in to 205 with her mother. It isn’t long before she realises there is another, unseen resident, and convinces best friend Christina to help her make contact. When they do, the girls learn more than they bargained for, and soon find themselves desperately unravelling a series of clues in order to stop a malevolent being, seemingly bent on manipulating the souls of those he’s killed in order to gain omnipotence. Their only ally is Craig, a spirit they’ve befriended via a Ouija board, but as the story unfolds, the girls discover things aren’t quite as straightforward as they’d assumed.
Excerpt:
Christina closed the book, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. Before Sarah had moved from Parthil, they had slept at each other’s houses almost every fortnight. There was nothing special, nothing unusual about it, it was just what they did. On the day that he died, Craig walked into 205 as routine, not knowing that he wouldn’t be leaving the following morning. She shook her head. “What happened in there?” she muttered aloud.
Putting the books beside her, she got up and crossed the room to where she’d left the glass. Raising it to her lips, she turned back just in time to see the book slip from the bed and hit the floor with a thud.
It landed perfectly balanced along the length of its spine, and Christina’s arm faltered before she took a cautious step towards it. As she did, the front and back covers splayed open hard, meeting the carpet flush with a muffled clap, and she froze, watching light-headed as the pages fanned out, fingered enthusiastically by the invisible being that sat on the floor by her bed. As she thought this, an incredible urge to wheel around and flee out onto the landing engulfed her.
And then what? Go where?
Christina dropped the glass back onto the desk. Her heart thumped sporadically, sending waves of pain through her left armpit, and her legs actually began to buckle, whilst her throat tightened to the point that she thought she may just pass out, and it was here, in this precise moment of pure panic, that the girl found an eerie solace, and she understood completely.
She had to regain control of the situation.
Christina turned her back on the book and faced the open door. She took a moment to close her eyes and draw a deep breath before taking the handle in her palm and shutting off the exit, flinching as the catch clicked home. She opened her eyes and returned to confront the scenario.
The pages were still moving. Swallowing hard, Christina took a single step forward and crouched level with the bed.
“Craig,” she whispered, “please stop.”
It halted immediately. A chill licked at the nape of Christina’s neck and she shivered violently, but her voice remained unaffected.
“You want me to see something?”
A few seconds went by before any movement resumed, and when it did, it wasn’t individual leaves but a whole section that turned. The definite motion made Christina jump, and the pounding in her chest accentuated. It took a moment for her to redeem her composure before she was able to crawl forward and peer into the book.
The pages were bent backwards, unnaturally pinned open against the spine, and her hand shook as it stretched out towards it. Placing all four fingers along the centrefold, she murmured, “thanks,” and the pressure relaxed, causing the pages to curl around her hand like a Venus fly-trap. Christina snatched the book off the floor and stood up, her eyes flittering about the carpet as she backed off. She saw nothing else, so her paranoid search of the room ceased, and she looked down at the object in hand.
The pages that her fingers marked had the heading “Divination” at the top left hand side, and the subject matter spanned both pages, but that wasn’t what drew her attention, for, unlike the other pages that Christina had seen, there was just a single sentence written throughout the margin:
A power shared is a power divided—revoke the amalgamation