…and ready to make some fresh starts.

Well, not quite ready. Or perhaps not quite fresh starts. I’ve finished one round of edits on A Gift of Time. Mostly, it was the easy stuff: the simple notes that I and some of my beta readers made while reading. Sentence tweaks, punctuation changes, word fixes, a few line edits, and some minor revisions to fix continuity issues or small plot holes.

I still need to rewrite Chapter Ten. Also I need to review one of the earlier chapters to see how and if I can implement a substantial change. Then I’ll go through most of my beta reads again. I’ve got ten or so, some with substantial comments. I have a tendency on my first review of set of beta notes to reject some comments that on a second review make me think, “well, maybe…” So I’ll do that. Then I’ll start the copy-edit. I need to go back and dig up my last style-sheet, from A Gift of Thought. It’s basically a list of words to check: I look at every “that,” every “ly,” every “was,” plus a whole bunch more (just, actually, some, a little, quite), and decide if they’re needed, if they could be replaced, if I could find a better way to say what I was trying to say. Hmm, planning out what I’m going to do is making me tired. I think I’d better stop planning it and just start doing it!

Onto Chapter 10. And back, I hope, to my daily posting here. It may not work for everyone, but the daily posting helps me stay focused in a good way.

Goals for today: work on 10. Probably not finish it, because I’m jet-lagged and in the wrong time zone, which isn’t the most conducive state of mind for writing coherently, much less well. But at least make some initial attempts at finalizing it.