This week in writing...

I sent this to Mechmaster. Since I'm being lazy I just cc'd it here. :)

This week I decided to clean up one of my books since people are picking up the new one and then going back and buying the old ones too. I thought I'd do a quick pass with one of them, choosing New Dawn because it's part of the Engineer series.

I thought I'd just do a quick thing, just a synonym filter convert it to Times Roman 10 point... and stuff like that... Take a day tops. But as I started in I saw how many mistakes I made and decided to just keep at it. It took forever! 6+ hours a day all week!

It didn't help that my pc has been overheating a lot lately. Even while Idle it's been running at 65 C. I've been getting all sorts of errors so I've been shutting down in the afternoon. Fortunately I cleaned it this morning and put new thermal paste on the cpu. I didn't have enough but what little I had made a huge difference. It's running 20 degrees cooler if you can believe it!

So, just as I was about to finish cleaning this afternoon New Dawn I was invaded by the brat pack. That's what I get for text tormenting my nephew about lunch! lol

While they were in the pool I managed to finish the last three pages and then convert the file, test it, and then upload it. Hopefully it's better then before.

Well, I mean it is, it's a heck of a lot better than it was certainly, but not nearly as good as what I've sent to you lately. And of course no where near as good as what you send back. :)

I noticed my writing style changed in it. The beginning had a lot of detail, and bits here and there do but the timeline is missing markers and I've got a lot of scenes that are mostly dialog. That's annoying. I need to get back to writing descriptions.

... but the dialog is now split up, it's not all one run on thing with no breaks. I mean, I went was terrible before I went:

- "yadda yadda." "oh," "yeah, yadda yadda..." "No, but..." "Tell me," "yadda..."-

On and on like that. I'm talking about no breaks at all in between sometimes. no he said she said or anything like that. And a lot of sighing and shrugging or smiling. LOT of sighing. lol

Also I had caps:

- "Yaddda." He pointed. -

Small sentences like that through out the book. I fixed a lot of that. Most if not all of it. I hope.

 

It was horrible. I don't really know what I was thinking when I wrote the book. I keep trying to recall... I remember something about having to have proper paragraphs, no one liners.... But I'm not sure.

The interesting thing is that after I converted it to Time Roman 10 point the page count dropped to 185 pages. I just finished it at 235 pages. I added what? 1 page for the appendix and 49 pages just in breaking the dialog up and fixing it?

It's not perfect, to be honest I wasn't aiming for perfect, There are some issues when I uploaded it. I noticed the TOC is broke up again. That's okay. I got it to work now though. I was aiming for a noticeable improvement over what was there before. Hopefully the future readers will appreciate that.

I'm not going to touch Bootstrap with a ten foot pole. At least not until next month or the month after. lol I know the grammar and formatting is horrible. I know the synonyms... the formatting is even worse! shudder. :P I'm just not up to doing this again so soon. I don't blame you for being tired of it.

 

On another note, I figured I should add an image so this isn't so dry. I think I'll go with one of the many aliens I sculpted for the Wandering Engineer Universe this go around.

This is a Garthian, a devolved one called a Dilgarth. They are mentioned in the some of the earlier books and will play a role in book 4 Ghost Station.

It's a raptor style alien, nasty, with those sythes and claws and teeth. Fun to run into in the dark Ghost Station....