Sunday, May 31, 2015

The End of May

A tad down to the wire, but I made it to 50 hours for the month of May. Third month in a row! Yay consistency.

I've got five chapters of Act 4 edited, with five to go.

About 9,000 words left to edit.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Three Chapters Down...

...and nearly done with the fourth.

Numbers game:

*I've edited 40 hours so far in May, with 10 to go before the end of the month.

*I've edited 3.8 chapters of Act 4, with 6.2 left.

*By word count, I'm 45% through Act 4.

*I've edited ~90,000 out of ~105,000 words of the book as a whole.

I'm getting there, but sometimes it feels like a Zeno's paradox situation. Halfway through the book... then halfway through the second half... then halfway through the final quarter...

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Two Chapters Down

I'm at 29.5 hours in May so far, and am 30% of the way through Act 4.

I'm starting to get excited. Guys, I think I am actually going to FINISH a BOOK!

Saturday, May 16, 2015

One Chapter Down...

...nine to go to finish the book. I'm about a third of the way through the next one.

I was feeling discouraged until I checked the word count and realized I'm nearly a quarter of the way through Act 4. Some of these chapters toward the end are short, yo.

A quarter done is still way behind where I'd hoped I'd be by mid-month... but it's way ahead of one-tenth done, which is where I thought I was based on chapters.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Slow, But Painful-- Part the Third

Good news: the Beta Project has yielded me another beta reader! I've had a few other offers, so it's looking like I have 4-5 generous readers willing to give feedback.

Bad news: to quote The Husband, it's been Slow But Painful lately. I blithely thought I would just fly through Act 4, but here we are at mid-month and I am still on the first chapter.

I was derailed for a few days this week by two tragedies that hit close to home, but I worked for 4 hours today and am almost where I should be in terms of hours. This first chapter is probably the longest of the whole Act. The first scene went smoothly, but the second just took forever. Now I'm halfway through the third. The chapter after this is just one scene that needs only light editing, so I'm hoping the pace picks up. I am nervous about finishing the edit, plus having time for a last read-through, by the end of the month.

But hey! I didn't stop. Go me.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

The Plan

I've worked for 9 hours in May so far.

Act 3 is trimmed, spell- and grammar-checked, and copied and pasted into the master "final" file.

I made myself an outline of Act 4:

19 story chunks in 10 chapters (some chapters near the end are very short).

Of the 19:

14 need relatively minor editing
5 need more extensive editing

Not too awful. I'm already through the first chunk. 18 to go!


Friday, May 1, 2015

May Goals

50 hours a month seems to be working well-- easily achievable, yet enough to make some serious progress. So that will be my overall goal for May.

More specific goals:

*finish word-search trimming and spell/grammar checking Act 3
*edit Act 4
*word-search trim and spell/grammar check Act 4
*one last read-through
*send to Betas!

In addition, I'll have 3 crits to do for the beta project, as well as getting started on any beta offers I make (I intend to make at least 2).

I worked for 2.5 hours today and am close to done with the Act 3 trimming. The bad news is that this tends to take longer than I expect it to. The good news is that I've cut ~1,300 words so far.