Overview

Edward has been editor for a series of sci-fi novels that include short stories from popular authors. He decided it made sense to do a podcast to talk with these authors.

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Transcript

[00:00:50] Stephen: Let's move on to some authors. And we're going to talk about podcasting, which I think is great because obviously we both do it. But before we do that, you've been [00:01:00] writing for quite a while. What can you think of that you did at one time when you started that you're doing different now that you've changed or learned from

[00:01:09] Edward: not that much has changed from very beginning of the way I wrote, I've always done a full first.

And then gone back and revised, I guess what's changed. The most of course is the use of computers. When I started, I was composing my first one, because it was done as a school thing is, is handwritten. But I quickly stopped doing that cause I had terrible handwriting. Uh, as soon as I started typing everything and I've always done a full first draft, I go back to the beginning.

I revise it once, twice. And then I send it off and I, that has not changed in all these years. The only difference now is that I write it on the computer, go back and revise it on the computer two or three times. And then I send it off. I don't use beta readers. I've never had anybody. I show it to the first person who sees it after me as an editor.

And yeah, that's nothing has changed [00:02:00] really.

[00:02:02] Stephen: You don't, if you have a good process, it doesn't mean you have to do the newest, greatest thing that's going on or change what you're doing. If

[00:02:11] Edward: one of the great things about my podcast is asking basically that same question to all these other authors and you find out that everybody does it differently and there is no one way to write.

[00:02:21] Stephen: Yeah, I've heard that a lot. Also the most people use word, what do you use? What do you use the right with software services?

[00:02:30] Edward: I downloaded Scrivener cause I'd heard good things about it. And I have yet to use it. I don't want to learn how to do all that stuff. I just want to type, and of course, word itself has its own foibles and things, but that's what I use.

And it mainly because it's a standard for submitting manuscripts and stuff is word. So when I first started on computers, it was Commodore 60 fours. There was a word processor called paperclip. And it was very good, except it just wrapped. It [00:03:00] didn't have, it was just, it just kept typing it. We get to the end and then you'd get returned to make a new paragraph.

And it was limited to 499 lines of text per file. And as a result that turned out to be about nine to 10 pages in actual manuscript format and all the books I wrote on paperclip have chapter. How about nine or 10 pages? I started trading myself to write chapters that were the same length as the files I could fit onto a paperclip.

And that may have carried over. That still seems to be, oh, I feel like I'm about at the end of a chapter. If I look it's typically, oh, that's about 10 pages. So I think I've got it in my head back in counter 64 days, I

[00:03:37] Stephen: used a speed script, which was a type in from compute. But you actually had that, enter it by hand.

That's totally foreign to the kids nowadays. Let me