(Part One)
I’m kind of wishing I had come up with a better title for this series of posts. Ah, well.
I left off last time with a relatively clean draft in Scrivener. All my edits and notes from my beta readers were in, and I had made a sweep for common errors and for general clean-up. I was ready for my final editing pass before publication.
After I put up that blog post, I got back to work. I used Scrivener to make a .mobi file, which is the type of file used by Amazon for the Kindle. I’ll get into the specifics of that in my next post – there’s a lot more e-book creation to come – but I made a .mobi because I want to read the book on the Kindle app on my phone. I don’t own any actual e-readers, but my phone has got the Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iBooks apps, so I can approximate how my books will look on other devices reasonably well. I’m going with the Kindle for now because the Amazon store is far and away where I make most of my sales, so it takes top priority when it comes to book formatting.
Once I sideloaded the book onto my phone via iTunes, I started to read. I read the book aloud to myself because it’s a great way to catch typos. I only started doing this with my last book, Mark Park and the Flume of Destiny, but I’ll be doing it with all of them going forward. When you read words on a page or screen, especially when you read the same thing for the umpteenth time, your mind tends to fill in the blanks if something is missing – your eyes just dart right past that missing period or preposition. When you read aloud, you’re forced to pay closer attention. Even if my mouth is moving on automatic, it’ll trip over a typo almost every time.
I’m not making many significant changes at this point. I’m correcting obvious errors, and occasionally altering some word choices. If a non-trivial word is repeated within a paragraph, I’ll change or delete one of the instances to something else. For example, I came across this sentence: She spun around, gesturing to the city around them. Two “around”s in one sentence is awkward and redundant, so the second became “surrounding,” which sounds a little better. (Although now I’m thinking they still sound too similar. Ah, well. Books are never finished, only abandoned, as da Vinci sort of said.)
Very occasionally I’ll catch something more crucial. The major continuity errors have all been fixed (fingers crossed), but some minor ones have slipped through. There’s a character from earlier in the series re-introduced in this book (no spoilers!). A new character asks the protagonists how they know that re-introduced character, but just two chapters earlier they had already discussed him, and she had been present for that conversation. Whoops! Fixed. I didn’t catch it before, because there had always been several days between editing those two chapters and every time I just plumb forgot she had already been told who he was. This time I’m reading the book so quickly that mistakes like that jump right out.
Another example – in chapter twenty-two, Tayisha can’t fit an important object in the pocket of her jeans. This time through, I remembered that back in chapter twelve she had fit the object into her pocket with no problem at all. The object not fitting is more important, so back to chapter twelve I went to figure out another way for Tayisha to carry the object around.
I’m a pretty fast reader, so this editing pass moved right along. I can get through about three chapters in an hour – that’s an approximation, because the length of the chapters varies quite a bit. The shortest is 1,290 (chapter nineteen) and the longest is 10, 503 (chapter twenty-eight – the big climax), but those are outliers, so let’s average. Right now the book is 124,565 words. (Thanks, Scrivener! You make counting easy.) At 29 chapters, that’s about 4,300 words per chapter (sounds about right for most of them), so about 13,000 words an hour. I got through six chapters that first Saturday, but almost every day since then I’ve had either a fetish festival or work. (One of those was way more fun than the other.) I’ve only had about an hour in the evening to edit, but that’s still three chapters a day, sometimes more. And this past Saturday, while resting between Pride celebrations (of which I took many pictures that you can see here), I went on a binge – I got eight chapters done, and finished the book.
So that’s it! A clean fifth draft of Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time, all ready for you to read, right? Well, not quite. Now the fun really starts, as I get ready to format. More next time…
