Working on the beast

My procrastination for editing my untitled story came to a head tonight and I finally forewent TiVo and got some much-needed editing done.  I'm using a great little program called TaskPaper to keep a running list of items to work on.  As I reference an item, I make edits to the list entry and it's been helping me so far.  If you're looking for a fantastic, yet simple to-do list program, this is it.

I worked for about an hour and a half and was able to get some important items taken care of.  First, I deleted all scene changed that were separated by a line in the middle of the page.  On 99% of them, I just made a new chapter and on a couple, I just continued the chapter it was on but added another paragraph space, so there are 2 instead of 1.

I had submitted one of my chapters to my writers group a few months ago that deals with a fight between Robert and his nemesis.  The chapter got good reviews but my structure and wording didn't.  The biggest gripe was that I opened the chapter with the dictionary's definition of 'impact' and then proceeded to use it multiple times.  I can gladly say that I have used the handy search tool to weed out any uses of this word and replace them with other synonyms.  I also re-worked the definition style at the top of the chapter.  Overall, I think it works better.

So that's what I got.  Another good side to this editing is that the book has actually grown a little!  I never thought that would happen, as I believed you only paired down a book during this process, but I stand corrected.  I have gone from 123 pages to 127 pages, and from 57,631 words to 57,754 words.  I gained 2,000 'words' using the 250 x page numbers method, bringing my 'word count' to 63,500.

Overall, a productive evening.  Time for home made ice cream and some Chuck on TiVo.