A little late this week. Life is to blame.
I started once again to edit by text to voice software. I had tried this once before in the past, and it worked out pretty well to pick out areas of ear klunk and other rough passages that you missed when you just read through your manuscript.
So I woke up way too early one morning when I should have been asleep, and downloaded the tts software again and went to work. Needless to say I found so many different little holes and issues in the manuscript that had Rewritten already once, so this is more or less edit 3 through at least the first seven or eight chapters. But it needed to be done because I wanted to feel better about them.
The second thing that is been interfering with my speed, has been how many chapters I have been writing out of whole cloth. When I decided to split what I had written into to work I realized that it was shorter than what I needed to really be considered a full novel. As is, it is still going to be a shorter novel then some of the 900 page monstrosities that normally written and expected by fantasy authors. I would almost say it is more a young adult length novel as it currently sits. I suspect it will end up somewhere around 250 pages. Of course, this depends on what happens when I finally get to rewriting the conclusion of the novel, which is going to involve a large new section and new characters that I had not originally planned on.
In the end though, I have been enjoying really listening to some of the things that I had written. I hate to feel conceited enough to say I like the way I write dialogue, because it just seems to flow for me. Everybody has their own area of writing that they enjoy most. For me it seems to be conversation. For others it might be exposition. For others it will be action sequences. I can only hope to improve on these other areas, and maybe gain a little more flavor and poetry of language.
That said I’m so anxious to be able to share this book with people and get their reactions. I admit there have been two people so far… no scratch that… 3 people that I have been able to share this with. I needed a feel of what I’m doing. My insecurities were showing up in one of the chapters, and I really wanted to get the right feel for it and not… how can I say this, and not come off as either trite or maudlin… fake ultimately is the word I guess I’m looking for.
Fortunately, it seems as if I have managed to avoid these pitfalls. I could never hear if the voices are differentiated except in my head. To get confirmation that this is so to others that read it are really important to me!
So here I sit, looking at what I have done. It’s achieved a new layer of glossy polishing, and starting to feel as if it is reaching a professional level. Or at least it is reaching the point where it will be ready to send to the beta readers and be ready for an editor to tear it up. My goal is still to try and put the book out before Christmas preferably before Thanksgiving. That will depend completely on how well the new sections I am writing come out, and the reformatted chapters take to fix and blend in. I’m a little nervous about that. But it’s something that I just have to force myself through and do.
So that’s the current state of affairs right now. I’m hoping to get a couple more days of writing or editing in the middle of this week. I expect to probably do some more biographical stuff for the blog coming up here in the future. I have some vacation coming which I’m going to take in visit with friends that I haven’t seen for a long time. I’ll probably write something about a family reunion I went to. It’s been an interesting week and will be an interesting end and beginning of the month I guess you could say coming up here. Tell him thanks for checking out what I have to say. I look forward to any things you have to say, ideas, suggestions, stuff like that down at the bottom.
Till next time.