32 Pages Remain

32 pages remain for the hand edit to digital conversion. I've devoted more time to the effort now. I find that I can go for two hour stretches without getting out of the seat or getting distracted.

Getting distracted has been a real problem for me in the past. Reading books or magazines being the biggest culprit. I'm using an old computer to write on. I stipped most everything off of it. No games or internet capabilities. The only thing I left were music and pictures. Both are more inspirational than diverting.

Music in particular is helpful. It helps to keep parts of my brain from being bored. I also use it to put me into certain moods. Brooding, sad, joyous, and so on. Most of the time I listen to a set list of maybe 50 songs. Then I flip back and forth between maybe 10 cds. There's just enough variety in there.

I hope to slam out the remaining pages in the next two days. Then its back for another on screen edit. We'll see where things stand from there. I'm going to shift my focus from self publishing to traditional publishing, so I'm starting to work on query letters and plot summaries and all that. More on that later.

11 More Pages

I slammed out 11 more pages today in just over an hour. An hour seems to be a good time frame for inputting edits for me. Any longer and I get really twitchy. I'm happy when I run across a page with only a few edits on it. But they are few. Most have lots of scrawled out passages, arrows, and other notes I have trouble following. When will I learn to write clearly?

I try not to mention my life outside the book too often - only when something has a great impact on my work. I am for the second time in four months out of work again. Which leaves me with a lot of free time to work on projects like the GIANT, but leaves me with a shortage of money (with which I like to buy food). So I have spent much time looking for jobs (there aren't many out there) and worrying. It had been eight days before today since I worked on the GIANT. I hope that I can at least find 30-60 minutes a day to dedicate to the edits.

Entering the Edits

I'm now in the process of making the digital revisions based on the physical edits from my previous printed draft. When I'm finished I will have a completed Draft 4. It doesn't seem like so many drafts would be possible. More scary is the thought that there will be a few more drafts before I declare the book ready for publishing. Hopefully all of the edits result in a better book. So far they have. I remember a poster in a high school english class. It was a quote from Stephen King "REVISE: Only God gets it right the first time". So, I figure that so many revisions can't hurt.

Everything is still moving well. I find myself making additional edits or crossing out my previous hand written edits. It's pretty much a second guessing of myself.

Currently I'm about 25 percent into the second half of the book. This is a part that I wrote early on in the process. Each part of the book can stand alone as it's own story - which is one of the reasons I started there. Also - I jumped around a lot when I first started writing. But as this part was one of the first pieces written, it's also one of the poorest. The segments have improved quite a bit, but they still need work. Though I have to say now that I don't hate reading them. No longer are they a jumbled confused mess.