August's Writing Progress

I completed the third draft of The Dragons of Asdanund. This is the language pass, or the right words in the right order.

I decided to try something different to help me find spelling and grammatical errors. I've noticed that when I'm trying to read closely to find those kinds of mistakes, I tend to get caught up in the story and start looking for plot holes and continuity errors - which are important, but not what I'm supposed to be looking for.

So I wrote a little program that loads the entire manuscript and outputs the paragraphs in a random order. (I'd like to have reordered the individual sentences, but for boring technical reasons, that's harder than reordering paragraphs.) I thought that if I read the paragraphs in that order, I'd be able to concentrate on the spelling and grammar, because I wouldn't know the context. But it turned out that because I'd been working so closely with the text, I could usually make a good guess as to what scene a paragraph came from. Still, I found five paragraphs with errors that way, which I thought was pretty good going out of 3811 paragraphs.

Something else I've noticed is that most of my mistakes are in sentences that have lots of short words. Most people read by recognising an entire word at once. But the recognition process isn't perfect. If a sentence has a mistake, your brain is prone to substituting the word that it knows should be there. This is more likely with short words than long ones, possible because they have fewer features that you can use to distinguish them from one another. So I searched the manuscript for paragraphs that had two words of two letters with five or fewer characters between them. This picks out things like "on top of", "to save it" and "so I put my". About a quarter of the paragraphs had a match, and I found three more errors (which I'd missed by reading in a random order).

Then I read the whole book aloud in the right order, to catch awkwardly-worded sentences (not wrong, just could be worded better). This found eleven errors...

So once I'd fixed all those errors (plus some plot holes and continuity problems), I sent the book off to my beta readers. Depending on when they come back to me, and on how many problems they find, the book should be on sale in the next month or two.

While I wait for the betas, I started another standalone short story, but I can't tell you much about that at the moment - not even the working title, because it's a massive spoiler...