The Gift: a Finished Manuscript

Update 5: 21-27 Dec. 2020

WOOT! First run through finished. All 50 chapters and pro- and epilogue finished. Of course, this is just the first pass through, and I will more than likely have more to go through.

The first goal was to get the continuity and the narrative flow figured out. To hunt down passive voice and other garbage. I had different goals with each POV, because for some reason, each POV had different issues. Slater’s POV had his origin and background mentioned in three different chapters… mighty redundant.

Rune’s pov was a LOT of telling and very little showing. So, he had to be rewritten almost entirely. Caitlyn’s chapters were very lush with too many characters that were forced into each scene, so I had to introduce her cast over more chapters but in more organic way.

With Keegan I needed to maintain his voice and make sure I wasn’t repeating too much from his shared Slater chapters. And Nemo jumps through time and his story has scenes that take place later for him but earlier for other characters and I had to be careful not to spoil too much.

Part Two:

After revising all of the above in Scrivener I finally tried to compile the story and export it to Word. That failed utterly. I’m still learning Scrivener, and I followed the directions, but the file I opened in Word was missing the first 20 chapters. The only thing in there was the chapter headings and then at chapter 22 it started showing my actual writing.

As such I needed to spend the better part of a day, copy and pasting each chapter, individually, into a word doc and then I edited each chapter for typos and grammar. It took nearly two days for my to do this because it was rather annoying to copy and paste. Then adjust the margins, then set the font, then do a complete edit of the chapter for grammar. Repeat, 52 times.

The Numbers

So, the numbers… Last week I did the final 8 chapters. The last chapters of the book are fairly short as the last 10 chapters all take place over about a 2-hour period and they overlap each other as I shift through the povs. So, I knew the end of the book would go quickly.

I had to try very hard to not add too many words to the end of the book. I really did struggle with throwing out the whole ten-chapter arc and rewriting the whole thing, but in the end, I have kept it all together as is. I managed to only add 169 words to the final total.

In scrivener the book is at 193,514 words. In transferring it Word I managed to get rid of some repetitious words… I don’t know about you but I sometimes write sentences that have “the the” in the middle of a sentence. So, deleting those extra words and a couple sentences hear and there, and with word counting differently (io believe it doesn’t count a or I) the novel is now sitting at 192,917 words. (About 100 of those include my name and revision information on my title page… so those don’t really count).

Merry Xmas and Happy Holidays

This week was also the holidays. It was a strange holiday having to stay home and only talking on the phone with people. But the world is what it is right now. Work has been jumping, I think I mentioned somewhere back at the beginning of this whole series that I help run a comic shop? Well, I do. The store has been busy… though, “politely” busy I should say. We never have more than a handful of people in the store at a time. But its enough to keep me on my feet and surrounded by something I love.

School Work

Well, school is closed for a week. So, I have no pressing goals this week. The next thesis diary update is probably going to be very short and boring. Though my professor is reading the first half of my novel right now, so perhaps I will have feedback to discuss.

I don’t think I mentioned this here, but if I have, forgive me repeating. But the program I am in only expects us to write an 80,000-word novel as part of the course. But writing an Epic Fantasy, I just didn’t see that happening. The fact that I managed 193,000-word novel in only a handful of months has been crazy. But the problem is I am only receiving feedback and grading on those first 80k. It makes me feel a little uncomfortable that the last half of my book is no where near as good as the first half.

Happy New Year

Despite the crap show of this year, I am holding out hope that next year will be much better. This week, I will be relaxing and working on character development for the next series. I do plan to outline and plot the next book as part of January and that will be the next series in the thesis diary.

I’m hoping to start trying to Query agents by the end of winter. That will be the other half of the thesis diaries for next year.

But what about this final week of this year? Well, I have extra work and inventory to deal with, so I might take a week’s break from writing. I have no assignments for my classes until the 3^rd of January.

Guess this a boring stretch for you dear readers.