Alpennia Blog: The Runner has Entered the Stadium

[hrj]

My primary blog has moved, but feel free to comment in either place.

Sorry about the irregular spacing of this week's blog posts. The Wednesday A Little Princess post may get kicked over into Friday, and Random Thursday may get skipped (or kicked to Saturday). I'm scheduled to deliver the completed manuscript of Mother of Souls...um...tomorrow. And while I'm still quite on track, I'm a bit busy.

During this morning's work session, I finished the final editorial read-through and mark-up. (I do this on the iPad with a pdf-markup app to avoid getting distracted by actually entering the changes.) Only found a couple of oopsies introduced when working on beta feedback. Like: a comment in the beginning of a chapter said, "But why doesn't this scene make reference to X?" So I added a reference to X. On re-reading, turns out X happened several pages later. Even beta readers can goof! Spotted a couple more places where I've done the same bit of exposition more than once. But mostly this pass was a matter of spotting typos, deleting unnecessary sentence-initial conjunctions, and spotting times when I'd used the same word twice in adjacent sentences.

To stay on track, all these mark-ups get added to the manuscript this evening. That leaves tomorrow for running the spell check, drawing up the reference vocabulary list for the proofreaders (i.e., anything not in the standard Word spell check dictionary), doing all the standard search-and-replace clean-up, and running through my formatting checklist.

This isn't my last chance, of course. There'll be a chance for more revisions when it comes back from my editor. But from past experience, this version may well be the one that goes out to pre-publication reviewers.  So I need to be willing to have the book judged by it.

Comments

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I am in awe that you are willing and able to invest so much time and energy into doing all this, in addition to your day job, so that we can enjoy reading the story. Thank you.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Would it be untactful to note that I write for myself? You folks are just the fortunate bystanders. :)

Not strictly true, of course. But if I weren't doing it primarily for myself, I don't know that I could keep doing it.