I’ve spent the last few days tweeking my new Robert Champion crime eNovel – Insure to Murder. What exactly is “tweeking”? It’s what I call fact checking, weather coordination, name checking, place checking and other cross-checking, as well as polishing the prose to make it read better and easier.
One of the handy tools in MSWord is the ability to bookmark specific items, be they words, paragraphs or chapters in a manuscript. When I started writing on typewriters (anyone other than writers remember them?) I used to have to write down page numbers, scrible notes on the pages or use Post Its and keep a list of notes in order to remember what to fix when I returned, sometimes months later, to fix problems. I still keep a note log of little and big details that pop up as I write, and in that way I can continue writing knowing that I’ve captured a detail that I need.
An example from Insure to Murder: “the tattoo on a man’s hand” – I bookmarked the first instance of this word in a conversation between Robert Champion and Wolf (Champion’s Native American associate). Wolf mentions a tattoo of a cat and a skull seen on the back of another man’s hand. I wanted to make sure I that I described the tattoo correctly as it figures into the story several times further on. I had also reasearched this specific tattoo before writing the passage, and I wanted to double check my sources later, so I added a book mark to the manuscript so I could return to it once I had finished the first draft of the novel.
Bookmarking – what a great writer’s tool. Now back to tweeking and spell-checking.