Every writer has goals that they want to reach. Whether it's writing daily, finishing 1,000 words a week,  editing a chapter a month, or sitting down and crunching out 1,667 words every day a month for NaNoWriMo. 

Staying motivated to reach those goals is one of the hardest parts of writing. 

In this blog post I'm going to go over the different levels of editing and what they all mean, as well as answer some common questions about the editing process. Along with each explanation, I'll include a short snippet of an example edit (except for developmental editing and outline critique, which are rather hard to show an example of in just a single paragraph).

​For my example, I'll be using an old homework assignment I did in college (actually it was the scene that eventually became the basis of my sci-fi novel, Soot of the Stars.)

This is the second part of my Ideas to Book blog series. (If you missed the first one you can find it here.) The last post dealt with finding an idea that can become a book.

​But a single idea really isn't enough to do it, no matter how good that idea might be. So you need more than one. A book is a bunch of ideas that fit together to form a story. Ideas that can feed into each other, and work together to create a compelling world and narrative.

I thought it might be cool to do a blog post about how a single idea can turn into enough of a story to make a novel. After doing a rough draft, I decided that it would be too long for one post, so I'm going to split it into two. 

Part One will be about the spark of the first idea. The one that starts it all.