The middle week of November 2014 was all about the edit.

I posted when I decided to kill one of my favourite characters.

I wrote several posts about editing:

• why I created a spreadsheet with all the actions, the plots, the calendar (with the phases of the moon) and the characters
• Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 keys to power of the written word
• a report on my last few editing steps and what was coming next
• a great list of ‘filter words’ — verbs that take the reader one step away from experiencing life as your POV character.

I also wrote a post about heat-ratings. Both more and less sex than people expect seems to upset people. What is an author to do?

And I referred readers to a nice post from Danielle Hanna, about using lists and careful analysis in developing your characters and your plots.

And on the day I finished the draft for the beta readers, I wrote a post on beta readers