Progress!

Read through progress to date…

Last week was a very busy week, although they all seem to be busy these days. However, I found a couple of hours on Friday and a few more on Saturday to get to grips with the reading and, while I’m not quite at the 75% target for the week at time of writing, I’m confident that another thirty to forty minutes Sunday afternoon or evening will easily take care of that.

Another productive week like this and I’ll be ready to revise up to the third draft!

Go me!

Thoughts On The Read-Through Process.

Chaos. Unmitigated chaos.,

It isn’t easy to keep up with yourself doing a read through using my botched technique. Let’s take another quick look at my set-up. I did take some more pictures on Saturday which more accurately capture the chaos, but my Canon camera gets ‘busy’ every time I hook it up to a USB, so this is a picture from some time ago.

Inconsistencies.

There are a lot of issues to worry about. For instance, it seems that an extraordinary number of rooms in the House are east facing. That obviously isn’t right. Also, I think I mixed up descriptions of two of the Maids that work there.

The first read through barely noticed these inconsistencies, overshadowed as they were by much worse plot faults, bad chapters and worse structure. Now that the worst of the trash has been taken care of, they are much more noticeable.

A Fix?

On the fly attempt at a character card…

The first technique I’ve tried has been index cards. Make a note of the entity you wish to track and note characteristics about it on the card.

I have a few problems with this technique.

1. As you can see, my handwriting is atrocious – don’t even try to decipher my edit notes!
2. From the picture above, and certainly from the picture the Canon camera is holding hostage, you can get an impression of how many index cards I’ve ended up with. It takes time to find the right one.
3. It’s something other than convenient to make sure that everything necessary is being jotted down. For instance, perhaps working through Chapter Five we find an obscure fact about Mr. Matthews that doesn’t seem important at the time, but in Chapter Twelve we run across a similar fact that might or might not conflict with the previous fact but we didn’t write it down. Should we write absolutely everything down? I certainly don’t want to do that, this process is taking long enough as it is!

A Better Fix?

Scrivener.

While having lunch the other day,  YouTube recommended the most recent upload from Vivien Reis, 10 Resources to Improve Your Writing or Author Brand. Her number one resource is Scrivener, and on many levels it seems like it might be a decent fix since one of its features is a centralized location to keep notes about characters. I don’t see any reason why I couldn’t use this to keep notes about locations as well.

So I’m taking the plunge and when I get this second read through complete, I’ll be migrating from Word to Scrivener. I’ll let you know what I think. There’s also a code you can use to get 20% off of Scrivener. It’s not mine so I can neither guarantee that it’ll work for you, nor do much about it if it doesn’t, but it worked for me on Friday.

Up Next…

Freshly painted walls in the empty pantry.

This coming week looks potentially like being even more busy than last. We’re in the process of getting our pantry ready for some shelving that’ll be delivered Monday after next and the place is choked up with cans, bottles and boxes of food. Making things worse, we have an attic ladder to pick up tomorrow that can’t be fitted until the pantry is finished and we get all the food back in there. Where we’re going to keep it until then is anybody’s guess.

On top of that, I have my Winter Business Intensive Field School on Thursday evening, and I have not done the homework yet.

However, the past couple of days have shown what I can achieve if I can steal the time to get on with it, so I’m hopeful that next week I’ll be in a position to start with the third revision, getting ready for my gamma reader.

Categories: Readthrough, Scrivener, Software, The Old Man, Work Update, Writing