Diary of Being a Writer; Week 125

Editing, cont.

I am editing.

I cannot believe how many shitty little mistakes you can find in something you have gone over three times!

I find it even harder to believe that I can read something four times and still find clunky chunks of words that were never meant to go together.

I feel like all I am doing is fixing bits. I haven’t done anything that drastically improves the story.

Hopefully, part of that is because I planned the story out. Maybe I will make big improvements later.

I have gone over 20,000 of the 80,000 words.

I am still forging ahead with the editing. I did think that maybe I could keep going yesterday, but I found that I started getting less nit-picky as I got tired. Although I was technically still editing I wasn’t looking at it as thoroughly as I should be to find not just typos and mistakes but actual problems. I certainly wasn’t checking the continuity of characters dialogue characteristics. Nor was I analysing the timelines carefully, so I stopped.

I did pass 30,00 words, so that’s pretty good.

Then I read Nabakov’s Favourite Word is Mauve. Lots of fascinating stats about the use of words by various writers. Some myths busted about what words are okay…