Edging Toward Release...

...and for the record, I've given up on the "Errata" page posted back in May. After four months of wordsmithing the MS page by page, paragraph by paragraph and line by line, I've found just TOO many edits to even contemplate listing them all. The Errata page goes dead, and along with it, the Replacement Book Offer I made there. Since I pulled the MS after selling just a single copy, I don't feel that anyone's going to be cheated out of anything here.

Suffice it to say that the whole "6th-draft" experience was humbling indeed. I begin to see more clearly with every pass through the MS the value of a professional editor to identify weaknesses and errors and get the author moving on them. By the time I completed the 6th draft run-through (with the grammar checker finally turned on, to point out my many grammatical and syntactical sins:(), I had found and corrected a minimum of 2,000 errors in the MS.

Generally, my errors - so easy to see now, with the benefit of two years of "cooling off" since I completed the first draft - fall into five categories, all of which I know better than to indulge in. The big categories are;

1. Simple typos and word substitutions that the spelling checker didn't pick up (their for they're, to for too, etc) This one puzzles me. I must have had the spelling checker turned off - a lot..
   
2. Passive Voice - I had no idea I so often resort to long, contorted passive sentences ("the box was packed with/He was slow in climbing to his feet, etc)
3. "Null words" - LOTS of instances where I gratuituously used "that" and "which".
4. Sentences beginning with "And" or "But". Really glaring stuff! I remember writing many of these, and thinking that (see, see?) I was doing so consciously, to add emphasis to the statement. But (see again?) there were just way too many of these. Many of these were edited to create compound sentences (and note the passive voice...)
   
5. Run-on sentences. I had no idea I was such a wordy writer (well, actually, I did, but I thought I had already addressed that...). The good folks at Microsoft must have pointed out three hundred incidences of "Long Sentence - consider revising", and by combining those "And" and "But" sentences, I just created even more of these.

The bottom line is, I'm no longer very confident about anything regarding the novel. I just checked CreateSpace, and note that the book is now shown with the status as "Retired". I assume I can resurrect it, but I'm not quite ready yet. After getting burned with the first release, I really don't want to make the same mistake again - just one more pass through to check that I really did mean to write all those Sentence Fragments...

ClustrMap

I just added ClustrMaps to this site, and it's interesting watching markers beginning to come in from around the world. I guess that these are just random hits from people trolling the web for something to do with climate, weather or the environment, but they are proof that the "long tail" really does work! Now if only it'll work as well when the book's actually released in spreading the word and building a reader base. Stranger things have happened!

IF you end up at this site, do leave a comment, even if it's to dis my layout or berate me for running a blog on a book by an unknown author that's not yet even released.

On that note, the MS text for Draft 6 is now done, with over a thousand edits hopefully moving it up a notch from badly flawed and unedited to finished to the extent that a novice writer can. If you're interested in speculative fiction, particularly with an environmental subtext, watch for Mai Shangri-La available for shipping on Amazon by mid-October.

Another month trickles by...

...and Mai Shangri-La's still - Not!

It's been a challenging new year, both personally and professionally, and work on brining Main Shangri-La to a (tentative) conclusion has languished. It's not that I'm not working on it. I grab a few minutes every day to pore over another couple of pages winkling out more of those irritating typos, grammatical errors and compositional weaknesses. The problem is that it has been, quite literally a few minutes each day instead of a few hours. With the amount of work yet to do, it's likle to be months, rather than weeks more to bring it to conclusion.

I've got about 100 pages left to go. The first 150 pages are finished in electronic draft, but beyond that, the edits are just pencilled into my 5th draft proof copy. I'd better not lose that copy, or I'll be like Hemingway and his famous lost novel in Paris. It's likely never to see the light of day.

But no, that's not going to happen. I AM going to plow through the last 1oo pages. I AM going to get the electronic MS tweaked and sent off to CreateSpace. I AM going to finish this up soon and move on to other projects. I am...