1500 words today. My total is lower because I got blown up by all the people I’m working with…in a good way.
First, my cover designer has finally finished the design for Book 1. I approved it today.
Second, developer #1 sent me the first draft of the repeating word macro that I hired him to code for me. This was a very tricky project with some very specific requirements, but he got it done. There are just a few minor things he has to tie up in the next day or two, but it’s AWESOME. (Go to WordPress for a screenshots).
Basically, the macro scans every instance of a repeated word within a 250-word radius (and I can change the radius if I want). It then highlights each repeated word with matching colors so I can see visually where the concentrations are.
Here are screenshots:
I’ll admit it is a little busy, but I have a feature called Excluded words where I can add excluded words that I don’t want to show up in the search. I should be able to refine this over time.
Anyhoo, this macro helped me catch a metric crapton of repeated words within a short radius. Let me give you an example:
“He looked over at a short woman in an afro and maroon shorts.” #cringe
I caught a BUNCH of these errors, which may not be immediately noticeable to readers, but they’re painfully obvious in audiobook format. This is a huge accomplishment and will go a long way to catching a lot of issues that my editors don’t always see.
It’s painful to go through the entire manuscript for repeated words, but next time around, I can weave this macro into the writing process, checking each chapter after I write it. So this is a huge efficiency win, even though I don’t feel it for this novel.
And some of you may be thinking—can’t ProWritingAid do this? It can, but it doesn’t have as much functionality and is bit difficult to navigate visually. I wanted my own solution customized for me.
Third, developer #2 sent me the final macro to help me get my chapter scoring engine started. It didn’t work right so he is working on changes that he should hopefully have to me by tomorrow. Once he finishes, I can load the book into the chapter scoring engine I built and get some additional insights and analytics.
Fourth, my editor #1 sent the novel back to me. Yikes. I spent the entire day going through her edits, which were are legit. She caught a plot hole, which was helpful. She also focused on consistency & continuity, pointing out anything at the sentence level that didn’t follow. Overall, the edits were helpful.
The edit number was 243, which beats my average of 290.
I spent about an hour teaching some of her edits to my editing engine, so I’ll be able to catch a few of her errors next time.
After I incorporated her edits, I ran my editing engine on the story since I didn’t do it yet. It caught around 100 issues.
Then I went through the manuscript with Word editor (boo), Grammarly (yay), and ProWritingAid (yay). I probably caught 100 or so additional issues, especially dropped determiners.
That’s the downside of dictation…Dragon is accurate, but it drops a lot of words. Almost too many. I’ve decided that if I dictate more than 50% of a novel, it needs two editors at a minimum. And I need to spend additional time on the dictated sections when I’m self-editing. Even though I dictate very clean, there are too many issues to feel comfortable with one set of eyes on the story. I’m glad I dictated this story, but I don’t like the errors that kept cropping up. Thank goodness Grammarly and ProWritingAid are good at catching missing determiners, but they don’t catch them all.
Anyway, my eyes are jelly right now. I hope to complete additional edits by Tuesday so I can get the book off to editor #2 who will make the book feel like a novel and get it up to my usual standards. Then it’ll go to a proofreader.
And more than likely, I’ll start Book 2 by end of this week. We’ll see how things go.
Have a good night.
