Update: Still SEKARAN

Yes, yes, I know, but I’ve taken a brief (very brief) break from finishing, hmm, chapter fourteen, which is the only unfinished chapter now – I think – in order to do the first extremely tedious typo sweep, and I mean, honestly, this does not get less tedious with each new book. More tedious each and every time, I swear. I assume I will one day hit a nadir of tedium, after which the exercise cannot get any more tedious. In fact, maybe I have, and I just can’t tell because it all blurs together after the fact.

I also took a few days to read through the whole thing from the top – skipping over the unfinished chapter fourteen – in order to do tweaking and trimming. I do feel guilty for imposing all sorts of awful typos on proofreaders because I caught a fair few. On the other hand, I know for a fact that Anna S caught a whopping lot more, because here they are, so when I catch twenty or so, it probably doesn’t make a lot of difference to proofreaders who catch sixty or a hundred.

I saw a statistical analysis recently that suggested that the average number of typos in a traditionally published book is one per ten pages, or about forty for a normal 400-page novel. I don’t know, that seems plausible, I guess? I do seem to spot more in traditionally published books from smaller presses. Missing end-quotes, missing periods, comma instead of period, missing words. Not a ton of wrong-word types, as a rule. Audio narrators always catch a few, and I will say that the narrator who just finished Invictus: Captive – STELLAR JOB, by the way. But my point here is: one typo per sixty pages in that one, which seems pretty darn good. Also, now there are fewer, as I corrected those.

But back to Sekaran. Tweaking, as I say, and trimming. I don’t care a lot about trimming for Sekaran, but I do think most books benefit from the cut-one-sentence-per-page exercise. I’m not strict about this. I’m a LOT more intense about it when the draft is way longer than reasonable, which this one isn’t. It’s fine. 145,000 words is long, but not stupidly long.

By the way, thank you VERY MUCH for leaving reviews for Hedesa back in August. This is nice for many reasons, but one of the behind-the-scenes reasons is that yes, this past weekend, I got the notification that Hedesa earned an all-star bonus in August. I fully expected to, unless Amazon had changed its algorithms dramatically, because it got lots of pages read during August (almost 400,000 pages), plus those reviews, and as far as I can tell, those are the two criteria that prompt KDP to hand an author an all-star bonus. This is not a huge bonus, but it is certainly gratifying.

Length is therefore handy in the sense that a longer book obviously gets more pages read in a month than a shorter book, provided readers actually finish it, of course. Thus, long is fine with me, just preferably not stupidly long, which, admittedly, Hedesa was stupidly long. Sekaran is fine.

Let me see. Oh, Archon is coming up – did I mention that? I’m not sure I’ve mentioned that yet. First weekend in October. I proposed a panel topic: sentences. And here I am, on a panel about sentences. Well, related topics – grammar, punctuation. I’m simply turning that into the four basic aspects of sentence-level craft: syntax, grammar, punctuation, word choice.

I’m moderating, so I’m going to shove the panel toward sentences that illustrate all this, and I mean sentences that illustrate smooth vs awkward, rhythm and cadence, comma spices that work vs comma splices that don’t work, fragments that work and what fragments are actually for vs fragments that don’t work, all sorts of things. I don’t feel it’s sensible to try to talk about this without looking at real live sentences, so I created a PowerPoint presentation with a bunch of sentences that illustrate different things. I’ll do a post about that so I can add to attendees – I do hope there are attendees – that there is a more complete version with more commentary on my blog, should they want to take a look.

I guess I’m really keen on sentence-level and paragraph-level craft, because at the moment, I honestly don’t remember what any other panel topic actually is, even though I have notes for all the panels, especially the other ones I’m moderating. (Two others, I think. Hmm, I wonder what those topics are? Good thing I have notes already prepared.)

Do you REALIZE it is September 22? Good God above, where do the days GO? October is nearly UPON US.

My cats are happy because the weather is sometimes cool enough for the doors to remain open so they can go in and out at will, AS IS ONLY APPROPRIATE. But they are less happy because it is damp. I, of course, am ecstatic that it’s damp. We had an inch of rain last night, finally breaking a pretty serious drought. Fervent prayer: May we have another inch every day for the rest of the week! Even if the cats don’t like it!

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