Final edits

and a thumbs-up from Steve Perry. Thanks, Steve.

Counting words per line and multiplying, I came up with about 18,300 words: OpenOffice's word counter gets 18,770. Make of it what you will.

And for the next rewrite...

Part III is going to take some rewriting. I let Akshedhen off way too easy; it's starting to bother my conscience. So, go back and put him through the mill. That will make it longer-- maybe not a whole lot longer, though.

Forgiveness? No. Atonement, maybe.

It's kind of inexcusable that I didn't deal with it at the time. I was tired, burned out, and it was emotionally difficult material. I should have either not pushed so hard, or taken a serious break. Chalk it up to the learning process; nothing's final yet anyway.

This is precisely the point of my post about aphorisms. Add another to the set: Haste makes waste.

Steve P. is already pushing for me to write it into a 2-book series. Probably someone will suggest the T-word. (Did you ever stop to wonder what the world would be like if LOTR had been published as a 4-book series?)

Away it goes

First pass editing is officially done. Post-edit word count is 118,319. For reference, Todd looked it up for me: a standard paperback averages 250 words to the page, so we're talking approximately 470 pages.

I've sent copies of the rough draft to all of my alpha readers. Now to wait...

Started editing

There's not as much to do as I thought, or else I'm just not seeing it. As Steve said, the first couple of chapters needed the most work.

Maybe only a few more days of this.

I'm getting irritated with Google docs format issues: It keeps inserting these extra blank lines that I can't get rid of and that propagate through the text. What's worse is, you don't see them online, but when you download the doc as Word, there they are and they cannot be removed by any normal editing. Bother. Also, downloading into Word sometimes resizes parts of the text. And you can insert page breaks into Google docs, but they apparently don't download either. And the paragraph indents look fine in Google docs, but in Word they turn out to be weirdly irregular.

The upshot is, I think I'm just going to have to download the rough draft as Word and fix all the formatting stuff by hand, and email it to my alpha readers instead of sharing the Google docs. That's so early-twenty-first-century. It's a pity, because the docs actually look fine online-- but if they want to download the docs either to read offline or to print out, I can't guarantee the results will be at all workable.