Draft 5

A whole new draft - Draft 5.

Things are going slower than I thought. I made quite a few markups to the printed version, but it still seems slow. Sometimes it takes me an hour or two to make changes to just one page.

On the bright side though, the GIANT is a much better story for the effort. The first section of the book, which upon reading again I saw needed more explanation, is now more readable and has a greater flow. Hopefully this bodes well for the rest of the changes.

Hand Edit Complete

My latest hand edit is complete. My strategy of moving quickly through the work and making outline notes instead of long blocks of text paid off. For the first time I came away with a good overall sense of what pieces fall into place where. No more wondering if a character had revealed some important fact about his life or if the narrator had explained something to the reader! Instead of having read the passage in question months ago, it was a matter of days - everything was very fresh. I will tackle future hand edits in such a rapid fashion, with the only exception of following the quick edit with a comprehensive follow up edit.

Now its onto the digital edit - I have just short of three months before the end of the year - wouldn't it be great to complete it before 2010? It would, but given my slow history with this, I won't hold my breath.