Editing your work? It's important for all of us, who write, to find someone who is prepared to look through our work and offer some constructive criticsm. I have someone, who would not say he thought something was good if he thought it was bad. You need someone like that, who is not worried about upsetting you;  it's not usually fair to inflict this responsibility on a relative or your partner. My advice is find someone who is indifferent to your writing (that's not difficult for me!) and then you can be sure you're receiving the unvarnished truth about it. I don't mean to spell check your work (you can do that yourself) and I don't mean to say what they think of your style or sillly things like that (you should know what your style is)- I mean just to read the whole novel and say whether or not it made sense (in my case: did the whodunnit work?) and if something should be added or removed, concerning, again, the overall sense from a reader's point of view. You can't expect someone to check the grammar and spelling of your novel, or say what they thought of your writing. Assessing your work would require someone much more experienced and expert.

More about self-reading your work. At least you know how you want it read, but then again you may be doing it a disservice by reading it badly overall. If I could have found someone to read my work I would have used him or her. I felt physically ill at the mere thought of reading mine. And believe me- I mean that. But now I've done one, my advice would be try to read it yourself. Don't give up, keep going and you will get better and feel more comfortable. The only way for relatively unknown writers (like me) and completely unknown ones to gain a readership could be the audio book route. This way the customer is buying a performance and that must be worth something- especially if it's the actual author who is reading it to them. It's relatively easy to do technically, with all the computerised editing suites and recording paraphernalia we have these days. So, give it a go. One practical tip: look ahead to the end of the sentence and see what the last word is- then make sure you pronounce it well. Heard that at a Shakespeare actor's workshop. It's good advice. Also, read at your normal pace, so that your breathing is not too obvious. And watch those p's and f's, which can really create turbulence in the microphone. I'll say some more about reading in another post.

Someone advised me not to write too much in these blogs. Blogging must be the easiest thing in the world. When the Greek philosopher Thales was asked what the easiest thing in the world to do was, he replied: give advice. I've never forgotten that. And the hardest, according to Thales (once considered the wisest man in Greece) : knowing yourself.