Okay, so:
a) Last night, I finished the incredibly tedious job of fixing all the typos my mother found in The Sphere of the Winds — I should say, she is observant and picky and found A LOT of typos. She also marks every single comma splice, so I have to consider each one and decide whether to keep it (I mostly did for Araene and mostly didn’t for anyone else). She ALSO is so old-school that she marks all split infinitives. (She’s eighty-five, so you see she has every reason to be old -school.) I mostly left those split, but not quite always. Her eye is better than mine for “neither … was” and “none … was.” My natural tendency is to put “were” in those constructions, which I know is wrong, but I don’t feel it properly.
Also, there were a just a lot of really stupid mistakes. “They” instead of “the,” which is understandable. A / an mistakes, which is not at all understandable and I have NO IDEA how that happens. Plus everything in between.
Anyway, I sent the corrected draft to one more proof-reader, who will probably catch a good handful more typos. I should make a prediction. Let me see. Okay, I bet there are 25 egregious errors still in that manuscript. We’ll see if that’s a correct estimation. Once she’s done with it, I will at once finish the formatting and bring it out.
b) Also last night, I got comments back from my other two first readers for Tarashana. Very extensive comments, in one case. (Hi, Kim!). I should very soon be able to get into this revision.
c) This morning, I started looking once more at the epilogue I added to the end of Death’s Lady book 1. This is the project I need to finish before getting into Tarashana. I should easily be able to finish that epilogue over the weekend. I will send that out to a couple people to see how it looks to them — whether it seems to do its job of transitioning between book 1 and book 2.
d) Just now, I listened to the first fifteen-minute selection of the audio edition for Nikoles. It was so good I didn’t have any feedback to offer the narrator other than, “Yep, exactly like that, keep going.”
Yes, I do feel like I am juggling a lot of balls right now. Sorry if all the blog posts are on personal progress with all these things. That’ll probably be the way it goes for a bit, although I will try to link to and comment on other writing-related posts a couple times a week too.
I checked a laptop out of Mineral Area College’s library, by the way, having realized they have a bunch, so that has improved my life quite a bit. The library is not likely to run out of laptops for students to check out because they have a hundred (!) and it’s still early in the semester. The laptop doesn’t have Word on it, but the word processing program it has is sufficiently usable to be tolerable for a short time and it is A LOT BETTER than writing stuff on paper with a pencil.
Please Feel Free to Share:
I agree with your mother on the comma splice, perhaps because I had a tough English teacher in HS who failed any paper with a run on sentence or fragment. I have since learned to use fragments judiciously, but still cringe at run-ons.
As you see, I use both comma splices and fragments judiciously, but my mother would absolutely have agreed with your English teacher!