Halfway There

I have devoted a lot of time to writing lately and I find myself halfway though the edit. There are many ways to measure progress, the most obvious is quanitative. I can look at what number page I'm on in the physical print and see how many pages remain, though this is not too accurate. Through better formatting and more description, I have added about twenty pages to the digital book, so the paper version is out of date. Additionally when I printed the GIANT, I increased the size font on the second part of the book. I'm not sure how it happened, but it artificially lengthened the book.

Now I'm working in an old version of Mircosoft Word, but in the past the GIANT used to be a .rtf file. My .rtf editor had no page numbers, so to keep track of how far into the edit I was, I would measure the position of the scroll bar cursor on the screen. I would make sure not to resize the program, so I could keep consistent numbers. The length of the scroll bar was six inches. I can remember good days where I would cover a quarter of an inch in one day of editing, which would be about four percent, and that same amount of progress today is also a good day.

Now, I track progress by the pages remaining on the screen compared to the total number of pages. I'll make wholesale cuts one day and add pages the next. At the beginning of the edit I had 180 digital pages. The total number has grown to 206 at its height, most of the time hovering around 200. Therefore, there might be a day where I only take away four pages from the pages remaining column, but add three pages to the total column - which works out to a total of seven pages worked on.

Crawling Along

A few weeks later it's still slow going, but this was a particularly slow (even boring at times) stretch, so all the work is worthwile. I think I'm about through this passage and should be making some good time soon - I hope. I've been working on the GIANT for many years now, and I worry that I may never finish the thing.

I'm not a writer, but I am a creator. I make things. I have always enjoyed writing, but have never found any great feedback from my work and I'm trying with teh GIANT to find that recognition. I don't know what motivates other creative people, but for me its about 80-90% for the sake of the work and the rest for compliments.

A New Year

The first part of the GIANT is complete, it's now onto the second. I had thought that the second part would go more quickly than the first, but so far I'm moving no more quickly than before. It seems like I've been working on some of these pages for days at a time.

The slowness, however, is for the betterment of the book. During my hand edit I noticed the text is often empty of description and place setting. I made a note for myself about setting the scene - sights, sounds, smells, emotions, etc. I taped this on a shelf next to my computer monitor. In my print of the text, where the story needed better description I simply wrote "SET SCENE".

I haven't taken a lot of writing courses, so I forget about some of the visual communication to the reader. I'll find myself picturing the scene in my mind, but negelecting to describe it on paper.