Editing - the joy of erasable pens & applying (fictional) detective skills to footprints in the snow

Instructions to AI: Female detective with short, pixie-cut white hair looking like Inspector Clouseau with magnifying glass examining human shoe prints in snow

5. Monday 5 January 2026

In fairness, I don't think I can claim to have overachieved when I say I made notes/minimally edited nine of fifty chapters because saying I’d do two a day really was aiming too low. That said, I know I can’t maintain nine chapters a day; I know it’s the later chapters that need more work. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy using erasable pens (purple and green) to write notes all over the printouts of the chapters I'm going through.

                My novel would probably be characterised as cosy crime as the crime (a death, assumed to be an accident) is not brutal (well, it is, someone dies, but there’s no graphic detail, violent shoot-outs etc), the people who investigate are the remaining five members of the Crime Writing for Beginners class and it’s set in a small town and outlying rural areas.

I have fictionalised places around where I live in Scottish Borders, which may explain why I put my detective skills to the test today. In over three years of living here (in the middle of nowhere, 40 minutes by car to the nearest shops and town), I have probably seen five people walking along the road in front of the house. As I set off along the snowy, icy road, I noticed footprints going in one direction on one side of the road, in about 1cm of snow, and the same ones going in the other direction. In the photo, the footsteps to the right of the picture are mine (messy and in far less of a straight line) and those to the left, which (weirdly? Or is it not weirdly?) followed the edge of the road, including, as in this photo, the passing bays. I just walk straight along the road, I wouldn’t walk around the passing bay, except to compare my tracks. I also noticed a dash in the snow with every other footprint – a walking pole? I then had a brilliant idea for my novel … but remembered that it’s set in June and July when even Scotland isn’t cold enough for snow.

Snow in a passing bay (the Passing Bay sign is the shadow - there are no lamp posts out here) My footprints to the right, someone else's to the left, an animal's to the far left.

I have been enjoying reading and writing crime fiction and thinking of clues, but from talking to friends and, in one example, wedding guests who happened to be seated near me at a wedding in July, I realise how different our individual perspectives are. I realise that every reader is likely to pick out different purported clues from whatever you write. Something I’m trying to do with this edit is eliminate information that is completely irrelevant. It’s kind of hard to do that, especially if it ends up meaning I need to cull a particularly witty (my opinion!) scene.

I feel I should reiterate that “all” I am doing with this phase of the “big edit” is reading through chapter by chapter and highlighting areas for improvement or which are wrong. It will take longer to then apply those corrections (two chapters per day might be a little more realistic by then).

However, today is day one of my 2026 working year and I have surprised myself by reaching the end of chapter 10, I’ve printed out 11 to 20 and I’m ready to do another … can I do ten chapters tomorrow? Actually, probably not. It’s forecast to be -7 at certain points over the next week with potentially quite a lot of snow and tomorrow is the mildest looking day so we’re planning to do a big in-case-we-get-iced-in food shop (which will take up half a day). I’ll aim for five chapters.