Eight Hours of Editing
Heeeeey folks!
Iris is so close to being done, I can nearly smell it (what do books smell like?).
Today was a big day. Having finally received all the stuff back from my editors, I decided to take a crack at finalizing this thing.
Step one was to combine both Word documents into one. There’s a way to combine two Word edits into one, so long as they’re edits of the same document (I had to google how to do it). So basically I did that. I had both editors’ edits on one big document and then I hashed it out. I made MOST of the changes the editors suggested, though there were some things I decided to keep the way they were. I spent three hours doing that and got about 50% of the way through. I briefly stopped to make a delicious taco lunch and then finished the second half, which took another three hours.
One of the biggest notes I got from one of the editors was something I never expected. Apparently my use of the word “looked” is off the charts. One of my editors literally highlighted every single time I used the word “looked”. Visually having it highlighted like that really helped. Before editing it, Iris had 458 uses of the word “looked”. Now, after having edited it, there are 294 uses of the word “looked”. So that tells you how productive the editing process was.
Step two involved going through and looking for keywords. During my editing process, there were certain inconsistent spellings or capitalized words I’d picked up on. For example a character was sometimes spelled Georgopolis and sometimes Georgopolos. A lot of these were pointed out to me by my editors. Some of them I caught on my own. In any case, as I was doing step one of the editing, I simply recorded it on a paper (literally writing it down with a pen the old fashioned way). Then I went back and searched for each of those words to make sure they were consistent. This process took about 40 minutes.
Step three is the most difficult step to describe. Essentially I formatted by book wrong when I was writing it in Word. I had it set to “Normal Spacing” instead of “No Spacing” so every time I clicked ENTER, the next line would start lower than if I had simply just continued writing and the sentence spilled over to the next line. So my way around that was to click SHIFT whenever I wanted to start a new line. The result: Word considers it a whole new block of text, which doesn’t need to be formatted the same way as the text above it. What does that mean for me, you ask? It means when I change the text from left of the page to justified, it looks like this sentence here.
The way I get around this problem is really annoying. I selected all, I changed it to “No Spacing” and now I have to go through every single time there’s a new paragraph and click delete + enter.
That’s right. Page by page. Whenever there is new dialog or a new paragraph delete + enter. My wrists get sore. Plus, I’m paranoid that I’m going to miss one or do one incorrectly.
Aaaaaaaaanyway, I spent about an hour and 20 minutes doing that and I’ve gotten 1/3 of the way through this process. I wanted to get it all done today, but it will take me probably about three more hours to finish doing all the delete + enter. Then I’ll want to do a quick skim or something just to make sure it looks good. I might have someone else look over it for me to help catch things I’ve missed (let me know if you’re interested).
So all in all, I spent basically my entire day working on this. I should have at least some sort of physical draft in my hands soon.
I’m tired of writing now.
