Sunday, August 09, 2009

Betas - be ready

Hurtling towards the end of the first phase of editing The Woman in the Wall - thanks to Soccer Boy's evil germs. They robbed me of the ability to speak, which meant I couldn't do any work over the phone, which meant I had to adjust some of my deadlines - giving me some breathing space to get stuck into the editing. I'm really loving this story - let's hope I'm not the only one...

I'm well into the last third of the manuscript now, with a little bit of restructuring to be done. I'm correcting minor things as I come across them, but not being too pernickety as yet. That's at a late stage for me. So my poor betas will get a bit of a warts and all version, but as some of you know, that's not usually too awful in my case, seeing as I spend a lot of my daily life picking warts off other people's writing. Nonetheless, I am deeply imperfect and it's so hard to proofread your own stuff! Logic, in particular, often trips me up, although I'm pretty fast to spot it elsewhere. It's called being too close to your own work...

Updating the koala stats shortly, get the wordage in!

10 comments:

Robin B. said...

Congrats on the editing being done, McK!

Robin B. said...

...ya know, not on BEING done, but 'being done'.

Chris Eldin said...

I just hope the warts you picked off me didn't end up on you.

McKoala said...

Nope. They're on Whirl.

McKoala said...

In the nicest possible way. (Check his blog).

Precie said...

Oooh, can I be on the beta list? :)

And, um...status update:

Spent the week focusing on syllabi and lesson plans.

Did manage to think of three (lame) endings to try out on the revision.

And just last night thought of a new scene/complication in my historical WIP.

But as for wordage? Um....

Sarah Laurenson said...

Um. I'm with Precie. Got a whopping 82 words this week. Been trying to catch up to life and sleep and realizing that I need to write even when I'm tired cause it looks like that's going to be my natural state for awhile. And lord, I miss the writing.

The kittens still need fed three times a day, but we're almost all off the bottle. Need to start KA, I suppose. Still standing at two with new mommies. Would like to place at least one more. And the pooch isn't feeling well right now, so I'm worried about him and trying to get him stabilized.

Need to get back to not playing computer games again. That seems to be where a lot of my time is going - mind numbing time wasters. But maybe I needed that break for a bit.

Whirlochre said...

A pre-emptive drive-by warting?

Huh, that's all I need.

Meanwhile — hope all goes well with the edits. Should be a lot easier now you've de-sniffled yourself.

McKoala said...

oooooh, Sarah...so close with the pretty kitty care to being permitted a week off for adoptive parenting...but then you mentioned the computer games...blew it my friend!

Precie, thank you so much for the offer - can I keep it for Stage 2? I think I have enough betas for now, but, depending on the extent of the resulting rewrite, I may need more! (You're still going down though...sniff, sniff...I think Robin and JC still hold the record for longest solid block of time on approved)

Sarah Laurenson said...

Yeah - it's that honesty thing kicking my ass every time.

We'll see what gibberish pours forth when the brain is fried. Who knows, maybe I write better when I can't think.