Pam Baddeley's Blog, page 2

Spring Shoots

Cocoparisienne, Pixabay, Public Domain

Well, a gap in the progress log again, but despite the lack of blogging about it, there has been some progress since my last post. Firstly, I’ve been carrying on with the ‘final’ edit of the WIP. Secondly, I have to report that I heard back from the Magic Oxygen short story competition I entered some time ago, but sadly, I didn’t make the short list.

However, I was a joint winner of a small, non-prize but just for fun competition run on one of the Goodre...

Pushing Through

Pixabay, by Simon, public domain

Some progress over the last week or so. I completed the read-through to the end of the novel and embarked on creation of the fourth ebook version for a final read-through before approaching pro editors.

I used the process I started to develop last summer, and this time there were no ‘rubbishy’ styles thrown up in the Calibre conversion, just one for italics and the rest the odd ones it uses as part of its structure, at the top and bottom of each file/page for...

Still Making Progress

Gellinger, Pixabay, Public domain

Well, only the second post of the year; already falling into bad habits! I just seem to be doing so much and not having a lot to show. But there is progress, in small stages.

I’ve been working on the WIP using the text-to-speech technique which helps to throw into relief clunky sentences and the odd place where a word was missed out. I had to break off and go back to the beginning again a little while ago because I’d read in more than one place that it was st...

Keep On Keeping On

SymphonyofLove, Pixabay. Public domain

After the whole Christmas and New Year thing, it’s takinga while for energy levels to get back to normal as far as writing goes. Lots of distractions still keep appearing and I’ve only managed to edit another two chapters since Christmas. The situation is a bit like one of those old school reports which said “Must try harder”.

Hence, not a lot to report, but I am trying to get back to a regular schedule of blogging and checking in with the ROW80 motivati...

Catching up is hard to do

Do you know that feeling when there are too many things to do and not enough hours in the day? Yep, that’s been the trouble here, for the last few months in particular, hence no posting on this blog, though I’ve kept up with my round of Goodreads, Facebook and sffchronicles forum updates. Something had to give, and with the continuing edit of the magnum opus which occupied me during this NaNoWriMo – rebelling again, and had a ‘win’ with 58 hours of editing clocked up – it was this blog, sadly...

Onward and Upward

Since the last post I’ve been busy, so busy I’ve had no time to blog about what I’ve been doing. First off, I completed CampNaNo well ahead of the target which I had revised a couple of times but couldn’t increase above 35K (35 hours in my case, being an edit) because you’re not allowed to amend your goal once you reach the date when you can start ‘winning’. I left it too late for another increase so my last recorded goal was 35K and I ended up doing the word count equivalent of 65 and three...

Camping It Up

Or not as the case may be … I’ve joined a cabin for July CampNaNoWriMo and set myself a modest initial target as I did in April. Although I should exceed it, I don’t think I’ll be able to manage so much editing this time as in April, because I have a busy second half of the month looming. Never mind, I’ve been able to manage 18.5 hours of editing so far and have moved on with the current text-to-speech edit.

That’s also with doing three crits for an email crit group in the past week or so. I...

Lessons in Line Editing Part 2

staand, Pixabay, Public Domain

Since my previous update, I’ve continued using the text-to-speech method of editing and I’m finding it more and more valuable. It has shown up three typos so far, but its main use as before is in making it obvious where more work is needed. In some places, I’ve completely redrafted a section because of it.

So far I’ve tacked the first fifteen chapters since the beginning of June, and that’s with days off doing other things. So that is hugely faster than the p...

Plea to the Developer of Scrivener for Windows

Prawny on Pixabay, Public Domain

I was recently asked by Eden Mabee, in a comment on my recent progress, what I was referring to when I said I had been disappointed to discover issues caused by missing features when compiling in Scrivener for Windows; features present in the Mac version which therefore doesn’t have those issues. As the answer would have been too long to include as a reply to her comment, I thought I would write a post to explain what I meant.

This is also, in effect, an ap...

Lessons in Line Editing

This account of my writing progress has slipped for a while, mainly because I’ve been so busy writing and also learning how to create ebooks!

The last time I blogged, I had just entered a couple of short story comps. After that, I returned to the latest line edit, and finally ploughed my way to the end – Chapter 36. So far, so good. But I wanted to get the book into one file, (due to having used Word from earlier versions which tended to corrupt large files, I use the one document-per-chap...