faerie blood: rc1

Well, to its intended audience of one, anyway: my editor!

Finished off the last four chapters tonight, which went a lot faster than I expected since there was hardly anything for me to go over in the main climax of the story. I had a couple of tweaks I wanted to put in the final tying-up-all-the-loose-ends chapter, but other than that, pretty much nothin’. So I’ve fired the file off to Deena, and now get to commence a) being fidgety about the next round of reviewing, and b) trying to make myself not be fidgety and working on Lament instead.

But this is another milestone, people. We’re getting that much closer!

But editing of Faerie Blood RC1 does continue! Two chapters knocked out tonight with reasonably little pain; in particular, I was really rather satisfied to observe that the sequence at the beginning of Chapter 18 where Kendis and Christopher jam was almost entirely untouched. A little bit more tweaking needed to be done in 19, both from my editor and from stuff I noticed myself. I’ve found myself yanking out a lot of ellipses and adding in contractions–a result, I think, of me having spent so much time these last many months editing the hell out of Lament.

I won’t significantly reduce Faerie Blood‘s word count, I think, but fortunately I don’t have too. We’re holding pretty steady around 97K, which is a nice fast read! If I do say so myself.

Edited tonight: Up through Chapter 19; four more chapters to go!

The Editing Marathon of a Whole Bunch of Editing continued through most of today. I didn’t get all the way to the end of the book–but I did make it about two-thirds of the way through.

Most of the changes my editor’s asked for continue to be small. Amusingly, though, a couple of the side characters have now been tweaked a bit. Jude’s ethnicity has changed a bit and Carson is now a Seattle native; I decided I needed a bit more representation of Seattle-born characters in the cast, in no small part because both of Seattle’s Warders in this book aren’t from Seattle at all.

Out of general technical interest I tried briefly to load my revision version of the manuscript into Open Office, just to see whether it would handle all the change-tracking stuff. The answer to this question, for those of you who might be interested, is “somewhat”. I did notice that the program had noted various changes that had been done, displaying the old text with strikethrough and the new text in blue. But it wasn’t nearly as cleanly handled as it is in Word.

So I guess when any future manuscripts of mine go into beta reading mode or (fingers crossed) being edited by actual editors, I’ll need to stick to Word for change tracking purposes. It’s just too damned useful that way.

Edited today and tonight: Up to the end of Chapter 16. Seven more chapters to go!

I have now successfully navigated through revisions for the first six chapters of Faerie Blood. So far the experience has been very easy; it’s pretty much just like getting feedback from beta readers, especially given that most of my editor’s requested changes are quite minor. I’ve only found a couple that seem weird to me, so I’ve been able to spend some time thinking about those and coming up with possible compromise alternatives.

This is really rather fun!

And okay, yeah, fine, Word is a Microsoft product, Microsoft is evil blah blah blah blah–but I gotta say, Word’s Track Changes mode is super-useful. The ability to just drop in suggested changes and have another reviewer of the file accept or delete them is unbelievably helpful. So’s the ability to put in commentary. It does make me wonder whether non-Word word processors can interact with this feature at all. I’ll have to remember this for the next time I open up anything for beta reading.

Time for bed. More editing tomorrow.

Edited today and tonight: Up through Chapter 6! 17 more chapters to go.