O is for Organize

Organization comes in handy when it comes to editing. Organize and take notes, they are two aspects I've used both during and in between drafts. In fact, organization helps in many venues, including blogging. Like, if I had been more organized, I would have my blog posts done in advance and just be spending this time commenting on others in the A to Z challenge.

For editing, I do try to be a little better when I organize my notes and the novel.  I posted some time last year I think about my note methods for the previous edit. I did a set of color coded highlighting to emphasize weak words, passive voice, adverbs and the such with the help of editminion.com. Though I had to do a part of it on my own as any program will miss some and make errors on others. It wasn't that great on the saidisms because most of what would be highlighted on the site wouldn't be attached to dialogue, but that's okay. It gave me a starting point and I was able to keep the notes for the edit well organized using the color coded system.

For this final edit, the organize method is a little different. I split the novel in sets of 5 chapters and used index cards for notes on big items. This mostly focused on emotion, description/senses, locations and any extra things I noticed, like the gender of a teacher I needed to check to make  sure stayed consistent. I'm using my notes on the stuff I need to tweak in order to do this final edit.

I try to organize when editing. But it's a challenge either way.

How do you organize your edits?