Editing

The Editing Meter over there --> shows that Word Nerd has edited half her novel-in-progress. This is deceptive.

What's been happening lately is that Word Nerd is going through all the chapters twice. While she's technically looked at and made some small fixes to Chs. 13-17, she really needs to go back and hit them harder.

Hopefully, this can start tonight, with printing out the chapters and at least getting through ch. 13 again with a much more intense level of scrutiny. The middle of the book is tough, because it needs to keep the plot moving along, build tension, but for this particular book -- be an interesting lull because the character grows complacent during this part of the story so that when she acts later, it's too late. (makes perfect sense, right?)

Anyhow, the middle of the book was also written while Word Nerd was going through a pretty big life transition of leaving her reporting job for a year in poverty 400 miles away. If the middle of the book feels like the author is keeping a big secret, it's because when she first drafted it, she was --that horrible time of knowing that she was sending out job applications and having interviews for other things that her current bosses knew nothing about. Ditto for the protagonist... only more of it for her is that she is the one being kept in the dark, that things are moving around her that she doesn't fully know about and can't stop.

This second-pass editing is where Word Nerd really rips chunks of the story out and inserts new stuff. Expect the Word Count Fluctuator to start jumping around soon.

This is such hard work. Word Nerd's new writing group starts Saturday and she's really looking forward to more community. More on that later...