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!

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!

Went through Chapter 17 tonight, as well as tweaking a couple of small things in previous chapters to clear up things that niggled at me through this edit pass. And it has occurred to me, after all the yammering I’ve done about writing a book being a lot like doing a software release, that this is pretty much RC1 for this book. This brings me lulz.

Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up the pace tomorrow evening. I’m feeling a little off-kilter and am really hoping I’m not coming down with whatever crud is going around at work. Now is really not the time. Besides, I’ve got Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea Season 4 DVDs to look forward to as my incentive for getting done with this edit pass! I can’t keel over now!

Edited tonight: Up through Chapter 17. Six more chapters to go!

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!

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.

Lament of the Dove:
Edited last night: +75
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,743
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 122,442

Faerie Blood:
Edited tonight: Reviewed changes for one chapter! 22 chapters to go.