Since I'm more or less office-and-bedroom bound, here's some writing/editing advice!

I'm in the middle of editing my first trilogy together to make an omnibus edition that has the entire character's story in one volume, and I'm applying everything I've learned over the last 20 months as a professional author. I threw my back out using a cordless drill on the 1st of the year, so instead of just laying around like a slug, I've been sitting (well, reclining) at my computer, trying to at least get some work done, since I'm useless for housework right now.

Here's a list of things that I wish I had known when I started writing!

This can be a huge problem, especially in character driven scenes with a lot of dialogue. I used to avoid dialogue tags like the plague, replacing them with beats. I also have a fairly large supporting cast of characters, so when there's a decent amount of dialogue, I get pronoun after pronoun, name after name starting my paragraphs.

This makes your work read almost like a screenplay that is directing actors, and after a while it sticks out like a sore thumb. Mix it up a little! Toss in some environmental description, some actions, anything to keep from kicking into a slew of paragraphs with character names!

There's a phenomenon in writing called echoing. When you engage in echoing, it's a lot like the reader is hearing words echo in your text. When echoing occurs, the echoing makes your text boring and tedious to read, since the echoing words starts to draw in their attention, rather than the scene that has been being built around the echoing.

You don't need the massive dragon to rip the massive gates out of the massive walls. You can have the enormous dragon tear the massive gate out of the towering walls. Or maybe clip out a few of the size descriptions, that might work too! My rule of thumb is to try not to repeat a descriptor within two other descriptors of the same type; size, shape, etc...

Oh, man, Christopher Walken, this guy, he'd have to use, so many commas, he wouldn't even, -begin-, to know, where to start? Removing them?

So, writing the way you talk is absolutely fantastic, especially if you're prepping your work for eventually being turned into an audio format. It makes for much smoother flow, especially when working with dialogue. Unfortunately, it can lead to things like run-on sentences and comma-comas, where you end up stringing so many otherwise distinct sentences together that you have four or five commas instead of three or four sentences.

Reread your stuff. Seriously, reread it as many times as you can stand. Yes, I know you've just spent however long writing it and you think you know it inside and out, but there is absolutely no substitute for the careful and meticulous proofreading of your work. I thought that since I had made four passes over my first novel and corrected every mistake that was found by Grammarly, OpenOffice spellcheck, my beta readers, and myself that I had gotten them all. In rereading my first novel, I found a huge amount of glaring mistakes in missing periods, quotation marks, proper tense, and more.

It was positively humidifying.

(reference for the obvious missed error here: https://youtu.be/OonDPGwAyfQ )

I hear so many people say that they can't afford an editor.

I can't afford an editor. I'm still going to write.

Editing is a skill that editors have developed over a long period of time, just like any other skill. You learned to write, you learned to put your story into words that engage and pull in your readers, by the gods you can learn to polish it up.

Writing the story is the easy part. It's like building a table or trunk; you cut the boards to the right size and fasten them together in the right order. But now you've gotta sand it, stain it, and put a coat of polyurethane on it to protect it.

Some people like rough furniture, and I can admit that it has a sort of appeal to it. But if you're looking to sell your work, the vast majority of the time, it's going to need to be finished. Learn how to finish your creation!

If you're at the same place I am, then congratulations! You wrote a book! Don't ever, ever let anyone tell you you're not a writer. Don't let other writers scare you away with the editing process or the publishing process. If you want to go the route of traditional publishing, hunker down and gird your loins because it's gonna be a long road.

If, instead, you choose self publishing (like Andy Weir, author of The Martian did), do -not- skimp on the editing and polishing of your work; it can make or break a good story, and that's what we're here for... to tell a good story.

I have learned so much since I first published my work. I've heard my whole trilogy read aloud as an audiobook, and that both opened my eyes and humbled me. Thankfully, my medium allows me to go back and address my mistakes, and tell my story in a way that my story deserves to be told.

Your story is your creation. Create something fantastic!

MOST VIRAL EDIT: Hey, I'm glad you all got something from this! There are a ton of fantastic suggestions in the comments! I appreciate all the birthday wishes and tips for how to deal with a thrown out back, lol

As always, if you have any questions or just want to bounce ideas off of me, I will respond to every single message. If I miss one or it seems like it's been a while and I haven't gotten back to you, message me again! I very, very seldom purposefully ignore a message, unless you're asking me for bobs and vagene.

I don't even HAVE bobs and vagene, Mamajoudi, now stop asking, it's getting awkward...

EDIT 2: This is my oldest daughter's favorite happy Birthday song; https://youtu.be/eZ_ZQkV58Cc

Thank you all for the "Happy Birthday"s! Here's to another year of writing!

EDIT 3: I've gotten a few questions about worldbuilding! Here's a bit of advice I gave to a fellow writer a few weeks back;

"I have -so much- backstory for my world, but I don't have to use it all in one book, yaknow? And I found that as the story went, it started modifying the lore, and that can get -messy-.

So, what I did is break it down to what I needed. I needed a group of wizards, so I made the Council of Masters. I needed more story on them, so I dug deeper when I needed it. I dug just as deep as my main character did, and as the story went, the lore was built around the plot, instead of the plot being built around the lore.

Readers, in general, do not give two flying acrobatic rat shits about lore and worldbuilding. That is 100% for us. So, to make it easier on yourself, make the lore fit what you write, and build from there. It makes it -so- much easier, and it flows so much better as well!"