Mary Sisson's Blog, page 33

Progress report

Forgot to post yesterday, but I finished Part 3 and Part 4 today! Whoo!

It is now 72K long, which I think is a reasonable length.

Now it goes off to the beta reader!

Progress report

Did my final pass over Part 2! Whoot!

Progress report

Today was kind of a blah day—didn’t sleep well, had other things to do, etc.—so I just finished out Part 1 and called it good.

By the way, the beta readers are all done with Trials, which is awesome. I’ll look at that after I send the letters off.

I was thinking about it last night and was actually pretty pleased to realize that I’m not going to have a huge doubling of production tasks, because I’ll be laying Trials out but not the letters, and I’ll be putting up the photos and whatnot from the letters here, but not doing that for Trials. So at least it won’t be super-repetitive.

Progress report

So, I’m doing basically the final pass over the letters before I send them off to a beta reader, who will hopefully let me know if my explanatory additions & edits work. I’m also taking a crack at things like getting the names consistent—I don’t know if it is a good thing or a bad thing that my grandfather & I clearly shared an inability to spell or remember names, but I do feel a deep sense of connection with him on this front. Also he tends to list the bazillion things he is doing, and then complain that he’s getting no work done—because “work” = “surgery” to him. For better or for worse, I feel the same way about writing.

Anyway, today I did the introduction & most of Part 1.

Progress report

I read over Part 4 and input the changes! Whoo!

So, that’s a big hunk of the work done. (!!!) I’m going to go over it and make consistent things like dates & times & military titles. (Except now I’m pretty sure I lent my AP Stylebook & Chicago Manual of Style before I moved. Shit!)

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I got Part 4 ready to be printed out, and input the changes to Part 3. Whoo!

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All right! I have input the changes for the second half of Part 2 and read over Part 3. Part 4 is the last part, so I also made the file, although it needs to be gone over before I even print it out.

Progress report

I read over the second half of Part 2. Instead of inputting the changes, I skipped ahead and put together Part 3—Parts 3 & 4 are considerably shorter, so that didn’t take so long.

Progress report

Part 2 is even longer than Part 1, so I read & input changes just for the first half of it. That was a lot easier on me than doing the same job all day—I need to change position more. The new place has a smaller office, so I’ve only had my regular desk chair out, but today I finally pumped up the old ball chair. Having two different chairs makes the office look crowded and messy, but it will be worth it to be able to work long hours and still have feeling in both feet….

Progress report

I input the changes to Part 1, which seems to have taken forever. I’ve printed out Part 2 to go over—I may get to that today, I may not.

It’s odd to think that there’s not really going to be a proper editing process—it’s not like someone’s going to recommend a B plot, you know? And since I’m not planning to do a paper copy, there won’t be the laying-out process. I guess after I’m done going through it, i’ll just contact the copy editor and see if he’ll take a look at it.