Just wrapped all of the reader feedback on Green. I have a couple of dozen notes embedded in the text, and hundreds of minor changes and edits, along with a double handful of major changes and scene cuts. Starting either later today or sometime tomorrow I’ll a final readthrough, dealing with the notes as I go. Then it’s back to casacorona and arcaedia.
Noveling is hard. Don’t let nobody tell you different. One of the things which always amazes me in this process is how difficult the little details are. Plot, character, setting — all that stuff is challenging, but we work through it. Almost all my commentors agreed that two subplots were distracting, and there was quite a bit of overlap on other issues. The thing that varied widely was the typos. Everybody caught a different set.
Mind you this is a manuscript I wrote, revised, then did several close reads of. The proverbial fine toothed comb, as it were. And yet every single reader found all kinds of different little problems at the text level (”thought” for “though”, “at” for “and”, duplicated words, that sort of thing).
This has happened with every manuscript I have ever written, though the effect is magnified by the wordcount and complexity of book-length work. I rather confidently predict it will happen on every manuscript I ever do write. Yet I am always amazed.
I should go into the tyop business. In the meantime, I plan to turn Green in within the week, with any luck.
Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.