Cold sweats...

September, 2025

​So, Tamesan: The Last Wizard Saga Song 1 is released as a paperback, hardback and ebook on Amazon US. The new cover, featuring artwork by Kirsi Salonen, is displayed with this blog. This is the reboot of the original The Last Wizard (1995). As advertised last month, I will follow Tamesan with Chasse, Jaysin and Harmi, the three sequels to The Last Wizard, between November through to March 2026. Tamesan is available on the US Amazon site (link), so if you’re in Australia and want a paperback or hardback copy and can’t purchase through the US site pop me an email at [email protected] and I’ll sort out an order for you ($30 + postage).
 
Editing is a core process in the writing game and yesterday I was reflecting on a point I reached in my teaching career where I could no longer face the marking grind of senior student essays. In fact, I genuinely sometimes broke into a cold sweat when I collected and began marking a pile of essays because I knew I was going to be dredging through work I’d already seen in draft formats and I would be highlighting and identifying (not necessarily correcting) the same errors over and over and over, year after year, for more than thirty-five years.
 
As a writer, the editing process has a similar impact as marking, the only rewarding factor being that it is a creative and hopefully original piece and in most cases the work is mine. I’ve been asked many times how many edits go into a novel. The answer is not genuinely quantifiable because I automatically edit as I write. However, breaking down the process into its mechanical form means that I:

• Edit each line and paragraph as I write
• Edit each chapter as I complete it
• Edit the manuscript three times after first draft completion which involves – a read for fluency/sense edit, a read for typos/missed words, and a read for better expression
• Edit again after I receive feedback from beta readers
• Edit the full manuscript again when I believe it is close to completion ie the above edits have been done
• Often edit one final time after I’m convinced I’ve finished

 
As a teacher I used to have my Middle School students carry out a writing accuracy exercise twice each year – at the beginning of the year and at the end of the third term. The exercise is quite simplistic. The students were told about the exercise in advance so that they arrived ready. They were asked to maintain continuous writing for a 30 minute period. They could write on any topic of choice and they could change topic in the 30 minute period if they ran out of motivation on their starting topic. They were asked at the end of the 30 minute session to spend 5 minutes reading through and making corrections. I would then collect their responses, determine the word count for each student and circle each error I found in their responses. I would then determine an accuracy percentage based on the number of errors against the word count. For example, a student who wrote 300 words and made 8 errors (of any kind – spelling, grammar, punctuation) would receive an accuracy percentage of (300-8 = 292: 292/300 x 100) = 97.3%. Over time, I observed that students who were earning above 95% in the activity were usually competent students, say B grade or 6 in IB scores as a measure. However, students who were scoring 90% and lower were definitely struggling with language skills. Let that sink in. In most subjects, scoring 90% would be in the highest level achievements, but in using English it is a poor result and represents a student who needs significant intervention to support and boost their language skills. This, for example, is a student who produces a 300 word response with 30 errors.
 
I recently co-edited a friend’s manuscript of around 60,000 words and we went over it several times each until we thought it was done. We passed it to a colleague for a final read and she found 14 errors (including two missed words). We were both horrified and grateful and made the corrections. We think it is now error-free… If I’d run the manuscript through my English exercise, the manuscript with its errors in place would rate a 99.97% accuracy – but if we published it without fixing those 0.03% errors, it would be considered a poor piece of work because of the errors!
 
I’ve encountered readers on occasions who lament that they found a typo, or a couple of errors in a book and it coloured their experience. I get it – but, seriously, the act of writing and editing a novel is a mammoth task in so far as wrestling the English language and then human editing the work into 100% accuracy. We want perfection.
 
Why this discussion? Because I am editing multiple books this past month as I prepare to release The Last Wizard series and I want to make sure the general language conventions are 100% accurate in all four books. It’s a salient reminder for me that the writing process is both an act of artistic creativity and a crafting discipline – a ying and yang process. In fact, draft writing is by far the best part because it is an act of creative exploration, but it must be tempered by persistence, patience and critical self-appraisal and careful crafting to become palatable for readers. In basic language conventions, it must be perfect.
 
I feel a cold sweat coming on as I try to ensure there are no language errors or typos across a total of more than 380,000 words.