oh, editing, why are you so necessary?
Oct. 29th, 2011 02:23 pmEditing my own writing is halfway between the most teeth-dragging exercise imaginable (because I know the story inside and out, and oh god why isn't it done already so I can just let it go?) and a kind of weird mental high (because I am fixing things! I am making them better!). So I tend to do it a pinch at a time, or all in one fell swoop. The fell swoop method, of course, works best when I have a physical printout of the material in question, so I can viciously mark it up with red pen.
But I am not going to print "Out of Season." I just cannot face doing that much editing in one go, and also, my printer is kind of a bastard and I am still not completely sure how to do double-sided printing more than one page at a time. (I really need to write myself a cheat sheet one of these days, so I'm not figuring out how to flip the paper anew each time. Spatial visualization is not my strong point.)
So I have been doing the pinch at a time version of editing these past few days. I am maybe halfway through the second LJ-version chapter, when Shezan listens in as Hkreegah explains Susan's plan for an eagle to rescue Marigold.
The changes I have made up to this point are mostly cosmetic: tidying a couple bits of world-building (like, how secret ARE the rituals in the inner shrine? because that switched back and forth a couple times), deleting some commas, smoothing the flow of some sentences and paragraphs, and fixing one really annoying typo. Also, I made my little joke on Edward FitzGerald's famous version of one of Omar Khayyam's rubaiyat -- the one about wine, bread, and thou under a tree being paradise enough -- a touch clearer. *grin*
I have a feeling that from this point on, the edits will become less cosmetic and more structural, though. *sigh*
But I am not going to print "Out of Season." I just cannot face doing that much editing in one go, and also, my printer is kind of a bastard and I am still not completely sure how to do double-sided printing more than one page at a time. (I really need to write myself a cheat sheet one of these days, so I'm not figuring out how to flip the paper anew each time. Spatial visualization is not my strong point.)
So I have been doing the pinch at a time version of editing these past few days. I am maybe halfway through the second LJ-version chapter, when Shezan listens in as Hkreegah explains Susan's plan for an eagle to rescue Marigold.
The changes I have made up to this point are mostly cosmetic: tidying a couple bits of world-building (like, how secret ARE the rituals in the inner shrine? because that switched back and forth a couple times), deleting some commas, smoothing the flow of some sentences and paragraphs, and fixing one really annoying typo. Also, I made my little joke on Edward FitzGerald's famous version of one of Omar Khayyam's rubaiyat -- the one about wine, bread, and thou under a tree being paradise enough -- a touch clearer. *grin*
I have a feeling that from this point on, the edits will become less cosmetic and more structural, though. *sigh*