I've two books coming out over the next twelve months -- the ninth Nic Costa novel, <em>The Fallen Angel</em>, and the rewrite of my first book, set in Spain, and now titled <em>Death in Seville</em> (original title <em>Semana Santa).</em>

That means very soon I will get two sets of line edits to go through. For the uninitiated out there let me explain a little bit of the process that happens after you write a book.

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This is how it works for me. The first edit is with my primary editors (in London and New York). Their advice is general and will help me end up with a better manuscript all round. That's done for both the books due over the next year.

What happens next is a line edit. This is when a copy editor casts a critical eye on the text and hopefully spots spelling, punctuation, logic and what the movie business calls 'continuity' -- errors of accuracy, such as someone having red hair in one scene and brown in the next.

Finally I will get back galleys -- the book in its final typeset form. In theory there ought to be few problems by this stage. In practice, for reasons I've never really understood, you still have to read those galleys like a hawk to see what has still slipped through.

I'm now at the second stage. I'd like to think that at this point in my career I'm pretty good at punctuation, spelling and continuity. But there are bound to be some logical errors in there somewhere -- events that don't quite link, statements that have stayed in when the references to which they pertain have been excised.

Here's the difference between a newbie writer and a seasoned one. When those glitches become apparent the newbie will spend endless hours trying to fix them, rewriting, juggling scenes, often turning a simple knot into a horrible mess of tangles. There is a perpetual problem with changing things at this stage of a book: you always have to check the knock-on effect elsewhere in the narrative.

Think of this in terms of a movie, which is always shot out of sequence, based on location not the movement of the story. Imagine an actor ad libs a line at some point. It's a great line. Everyone loves it. Everyone wants to see it in the finished film. But the problem is that line invalidates the content of a scene elsewhere, one that's already been shot. Do you go back and reshoot the earlier scene? Maybe. But if you do that another scene is ruined. And then another...

It's easier to rewrite a book than reshoot a movie. But it can still be a horrible pain. So let me tell you how a seasoned writer will usually respond to such bumps in the road, most of which concern, let's be frank, matters that are decidedly minor.

You cut them out. Gone. Vanished. Disappeared.

Remember the word 'edit'? Here's a definition from my Mac OS X dictionary: 'remove unnecessary or inappropriate words, sounds, or scenes from a text, movie, or radio or television program'.

Make it gone and see if the story is diminished in any way by its removal. My guess is that 90 per cent of logistical copy editor queries can be dealt with more easily by excision than by some tortuous rewrite. So save yourself the grief and wield that red pen without mercy. Editors -- and readers -- scream 'less' more often than they shout 'more'.&nbsp;