Well, pretty much finished, for now. With The White Road of the Moon, of course.
Interesting things to note:
Of the five sentences that had no period at the end, I only caught one. Michelle caught four more. I wonder whether any are left for the copy editor? Wouldn’t you think those would jump out at you? It’s amazing what you miss.
I myself caught the two pronoun mistakes left over from replacing a deleted character with a character of the opposite sex. Wow, that would be jarring for the reader if one of those made it into the finished copy! Luckily they’re easier to spot.
Words I searched for and removed many instances of: very, really, nodded, sharp, intangible. Michelle’s the one who caught the over-use of “sharp.” It was in there 58 times. Now it’s more like 20 or so, which should be okay. Of course, “very” was in there 258 times. There are still quite a few instances. Sometimes it honestly does sound right, and of course sometimes it’s not “You’re very tall” but rather “standing at the very edge of the cliff,” which is a completely okay use of the word.
I’m sure the copy editor will still find many many many places where I repeated a single world four times in one paragraph. Sigh.
Still, the important thing is that my editor thinks the plot is coherent and the ending makes sense. Lots of little scribbled “Yay!” and “Fantastic!” comments in the margin at the end of the penultimate and ultimate chapters. Soooo satisfying. Endings are hard! Always a great pleasure to find one has pulled that off.
Next, gotta send my agent a note to the effect that comments would now be welcome on the last of my four under-contract manuscripts. And then choose the next project to work on … a Black Dog short story, maybe, to get me warmed up, and then the SF novel I have had in the back of my mind for a couple years. I have maybe 50 pp or so written. I need to re-read those and think about how to go on with that story.
Please Feel Free to Share:
I recently caught three or four missing periods in one of my favorite books. These things do slip by even the best editors sometimes.
I never thought of sorting a document by word frequency as part of editing. Once you get past the function words, things like that will pop out. Clever!
Any hints on Door into Light publication date?
James, yes, I spotted one in Karen Memory — those little guys are sneaky, aren’t they?
Pete, I wish I could say yes to that one, but not yet.