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.