Jane, Actually second draft finished
Actually the second draft was finished about a week ago, but I plunged right into the process of transferring the text from the Microsoft Word document to Adobe InDesign, which I use to format the printed book and the EPUB document.
It’s been a long process and I had nearly stalled out with the intricacies of plotting. Getting back to writing after the holidays was difficult for me and I’d taken detours into scale modeling and programming, but I finally got into the rhythm of editing in February.
Most of my difficulties involved the timing of the romantic conclusion, which takes place on the Saturday of the 2011 Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America. Unlike an actual Jane Austen novel, I wanted mine to end with a kiss and as two of my leading players are disembodied, that took a little bit of doing.
I was also dreading the conclusion because I decided that like my inspiration (the movie Love Actually), I would temper happiness with sadness. So not every relationship ends well.
The book is about 120,000 words long with close to 70 chapters. These numbers are in flux as I decide to divide long chapters or delete others. I decided to add some footnotes for those unfamiliar with white soup or British readers ignorant of the term dope slap.
My decision to switch to a British narrator and obey UK spellings continues to cause problems. The narrator, I’ve now decided, grew up in the UK and then moved to America … and then moved back. I’m sure I’ve made many mistakes, despite changing truck to lorry, spelling tidbits tidbits and changing shopping bag to carrier bag.
Some words get changed back and forth with each draft. When I first saw that I had spelled skepticism with a “k” I changed it scepticism, but during the next exit I realized it was spoken by an American and changed it back. The subsequent edit, I spelled it with a “c” because I thought that’s how my British narrator would spell it. And finally (I hope), I spelled it with a “k” because I realized it was an inscription written by an American, who would spell it thusly.
It’s such a large book (my previous books running about 80,000 words) that I get lost. From the time I start a draft to the time I finish it, I can’t remember who knew what when or whether my character’s name is Albert Ridings or Albert Hastings or whether his wife’s name is Katherine or Catherine. When I read it through, I realize I’ve used variants of the same expression “cometh the hour, cometh the man” three times. You wouldn’t think one could find three excuses to use this expression, but I did and the only words in common are “hour” and “man,” so it’s rather difficult to find where the expression is used.
I’ve used just about every Shakespeare quote I know, although I still can’t find a place for “a consummation devoutly to be wished,” which you’d think would be perfect for a book about the disembodied. I think I’ve referenced in one way or another every Jane Austen novel (in more ways than just listing the title), but I haven’t delved into the Juvenilia.
My decision to allow Jane to utter the occasional mild expletive or to indulge in modern vernacular still worries me. I worry that Jane saying “this is not my first rodeo” will cause howls of derisive laughter, but I like to think Jane would be just as fond as I am to get a rise out of others.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the second draft. After the entire book is formatted in InDesign, I start proofreading and I think I’ve come up with a more efficient, if silly, process. If I read the book out loud, dramatically (using different voices for the characters and affecting accents when appropriate), then it becomes glaringly obvious when a word is missing and I also get a much better sense if a sentence is awkwardly constructed. If I have to take three breaths reading a single sentence, then maybe it’s too long.
I hope that within a month, I can start sending out copies to proof readers … hint, hint.
