Pages Edited: 58/487; Pages Updated: 8/487
The title says it all. In the last week, I’ve only managed to line edit another 22 pages. It’s clear that I haven’t managed to update any in that time. I’ve started having computer problems (again). The last go around took two days and probably about 10 hours to fix (some nasty software issues). Still, I’m trudging along, working on the line edits.
I hope to have better progress news posted soon.
I first said that I was going to try to line edit 20 pages per day. It turns out (as I feared) that pace is just not going to happen, at least early in the draft. Since I’m trying to slow down the pacing in the first half of the novel, it’s taking longer than I expected to line edit the pages (I would note that the chapter I added in near the beginning didn’t take long, as the pacing was fine — I expect that the second half of the novel will be a similar story).
I’m okay with a slower pace — the important thing isn’t the pace, just that I’m continuing to work on it and making progress. I do have some days off coming up in a few weeks which should allow me to make some more progress, and I’m taking a four day trip with long flights on both ends which should allow me to speed up the editing process on those days.
Of course, mixed in there is the fact that I do try to take advantage of the few sunny days we’ve had this summer — constant rain for weeks on end sucks.
Also, I’m going to start heading each post with the following:
Pages Edited: 36/487 Pages Updated: 8/487
Pages Edited refers to the number of pages I’ve completed line edits on. Pages Updated refers to the number of pages where I’ve made the changes in the Word document itself. As you can see, the number of pages updated is lacking — I haven’t been home much over the last week, and my laptop is getting very close to dying (even moreso than previously reported). I’ve been out drooling at new ones on occasion, but with the whole condo-buying thing going on now, I can’t justify the expense (at least until after closing).
While I’m looking out for adverbs in my editing, the one spot where I’m not looking to correct them is in dialogue. In reality we talk in adverbs — they’re an easy (some would say weak) grammatical device, and they make conversations flow. I’m not going to change the way people talk — trying to remove adverbs from conversation would make the dialogue seem a little more stilted and unnatural (at least to me). That being said, I am still removing adverbs from dialogue tags — that’s one of the spots where adverbs are most overused and often the most unnecessary.
I already talked about how I’m looking at the pacing of the first half of the novel as I go through this draft. The next thing I’m looking for are the dreaded adverbs. I find that my writing, like many others, contains far too many of these weak links. In particular, I’ve that “clearly” invades my work way too often.
So my goal is to work around as many of the “ly”s as I can. If I can’t rewrite it without an “ly”, I have to decide if the word is needed (for example, as I was writing this sentence, I almost wrote “I have to decide if the word is really needed” and then changed “really” to “actually” and then realized that neither is needed).
I’m alright with the occasional adverb — sometimes they are the clearest, most concise way to make a point, but for the most part they are unnecessary.
