Wow, two posts in the same day. I guess I'm on a roll. Anyways, I just thought I'd do an update on things. I decided that my next phase was going to be unifying and formatting each chapter. What does that mean? Well I need to make sure that certain things are consistent throughout the entire book so I'm going through it again with my sight set more toward terms and places and spellings of words that are part of my storie's world. So I'm basically making sure that places in my story are consistent in spelling throughout so there isn't a "Median Island" as well as a "Meridian Island" that are both the same place. (by the by Median Island is the decided name for the island. If anyone was curious).
The other thing I've been doing is formatting the chapters so that they'll be ready to just send off and get published. So I'm changing them from left alignment to justified and I'm printing them out on both the front and back so that I can get the numbering correct. I'm also taking into consideration the blank pages since the publisher needs those counted in.
So I thought I'd try and do a chapter each day for 41 days and post about them as I go. We'll see if it works out, I'm not sure I'll run across enough things to talk about without getting repetitive. 10 to 1 the posts will be fairly small the next month.
Alright, so today I did chapter 1. I was pretty surprised by the quality of it this time around. When I just read over it a couple weeks ago it was in a pretty primitive state, but I guess when I went over it I must have changed enough to raise my opinion of it. It still had some rough edges which I think I smoothed out pretty well.
I read it over again after I printed it out (this time out loud) and once I got used to reading it out loud I thought it was pretty good. I think I was most impressed with the dialogue. I thought that it read very well out loud. It also looked pretty cool printed out with it justified, very professional. I also found a very stupid spelling error I didn't catch.
Alright I'll try to do another chapter tomorrow and post back.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
3rd Draft Finished
Well, I just finished correcting the entire book. It was a momentous task. First I started with the note my editor had made and then I went and reread every chapter over again. I added a bit here and there, but I feel like most of what I did was fix paragraphs that either had boring, repetitive or awkward structure to them.
Overall it was a tiring process, both physically and emotionally. I thought that my biggest problems would just be my grammar and syntax, but that seemed to be just the tip of the iceberg. It turns out coming face to face with the first chapters of my book were more daunting than I assumed they'd be. I remembered them being really good and entertaining and as I wrote the book I would often think to them as a standard for the later chapters. Well when I reread them I found that they were less than great. They were actually pretty rough. I mean I understand why they are, after all they were written about a year and a half to two years before the rest of the book. On one hand it's great that I've grown so much as a writer, that I've fallen into a certain groove with my writing. On the other hand it's a big blockade to know that I need to bring those chapters up to the quality to the ones at the end so that the book feels balanced.
Anyways, I think I fixed them up pretty well, they need to be looked over a bit more, but basically the book is coming to a state that is close to publishing material. I'm not sure what my next step is going to be. I know I need to go over the book again and work on making everything uniform and just make sure that I'm satisfied with the story elements. It's all just a bit grumbly, but once this gets closer to publishing I think I'll be happy with the amount of work I've put into it.
Well, I'll type back later.
Overall it was a tiring process, both physically and emotionally. I thought that my biggest problems would just be my grammar and syntax, but that seemed to be just the tip of the iceberg. It turns out coming face to face with the first chapters of my book were more daunting than I assumed they'd be. I remembered them being really good and entertaining and as I wrote the book I would often think to them as a standard for the later chapters. Well when I reread them I found that they were less than great. They were actually pretty rough. I mean I understand why they are, after all they were written about a year and a half to two years before the rest of the book. On one hand it's great that I've grown so much as a writer, that I've fallen into a certain groove with my writing. On the other hand it's a big blockade to know that I need to bring those chapters up to the quality to the ones at the end so that the book feels balanced.
Anyways, I think I fixed them up pretty well, they need to be looked over a bit more, but basically the book is coming to a state that is close to publishing material. I'm not sure what my next step is going to be. I know I need to go over the book again and work on making everything uniform and just make sure that I'm satisfied with the story elements. It's all just a bit grumbly, but once this gets closer to publishing I think I'll be happy with the amount of work I've put into it.
Well, I'll type back later.
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