Friday 24^th July 2020

Did I mention I hate readthroughs?

Today has been a frustrating day. I have Pokemon GoFest this weekend and most of my weekend will be spent hunting virtual creatures. I also need to prepare in the only way someone who takes this way too seriously, must, and work out which 500 pokemon I’m going to deleting in order to make room. Honestly, I swear Pokemon Go is 80% an inventory management game.

So I’d wanted to get the readthrough done for today. It’s a good, natural deadline and it makes sense given I’m then going to be busy for a whole weekend. I even had extra free time today which meant it looked like everything aligned perfectly.

However, whilst my edit has gone extremely quickly, I’ve underestimated the time I need to do a readthrough. And the worst of it is that I can’t rush it. It needs to be done properly.

In future, I need at least a week for readthrough. I think I got a bit over excited with how well this draft has gone and thought I could do it in 2 days.

However, it’s not all bad news. I’ve found a more effective method for readthrough.

In the past I would sit at my computer and read the draft aloud. The idea was that any phrases I stumbled over would out themselves as clunky and could therefore be fixed. But this time, I took the time to create a mobi file just for me and put it on my kindle (via USB and Calibre software). I could then sit down somewhere comfortable and read it.

Given I found mistakes from bits that existed in previous drafts, I’d say that the kindle method worked better for me, and I’ll be doing it again in the future.

The one downside was when I did spot errors. I’d be sprawl on the sofa, have just got myself comfy, then find a mistake. I would have to get up, walk to the office (just round the corner, but I still had to get up), find the corresponding part on the computer and make the change. The effort involved wasn’t huge but, damn, I’d JUST got myself comfy.

I started keeping my phone with me and making notes on that so I didn’t have to move, and then only get up to do a batch of them. Which worked fine until my phone battery got low and I needed to go plug that in to charge.

The end result was that I’ve got about 5 chapters left. In terms of emotional arcs, I think I’ve covered them all so if I’m a bit removed from it all when I look at that last bit on Monday, then it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

I’m glad I’ve nearly got it done. Will need to start thinking about what I do next.