Editing is tedious, part 2

Over a month ago, I stopped posting daily installments of The Stars Came Back. I said it would be a week or two to finish and go live. Oops. About three weeks ago, I said it was going, but slowly – editing is tedious. The story is done, now. I’ve gone over it several more times, end to end, tweaking it here and there, but also fixing basic grammar and word selection goofs. And I’m still finding them. It’s amazing, really, how many basic things slipped by not only my first reading, but my second, the several wonderful volunteers that have sent me a lot of corrections and questions. I had a long conversation with Sean about some big picture things, some of which he had some great criticisms on, and some of which he had questions about, but the choices made were conscious decisions on my part because I was trying to do something specific with the story. And yet, there are still minor errors cropping up here and there. Cover art is being worked on. Paul very generously created some much nicer drawings of Tajemnica from my sketches. It will be a much better story for the effort being put into it now, but it will still be at least a few days, maybe a few weeks if I hire a professional editor to give it a good thrashing, er, I mean, a going over, but I hope the final product will be worth the wait.
In the mean time, I’m giving it a few days rest, so I can let my eyes uncross, and think about what stories I could write in the same universe. So far, my main ideas are Lag’s komenagen, Allonia’s past, further adventures of Taj in the future, or a series of stories about Tajemnica’s past adventures; the downside of the last one is that they’d tend to be downers at the end of each installment. (for example, how did she win a battle but lose her entire crew?) Going in a different direction, there are doing things like looking at the life of a terraforming platform crew on a new planet.

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9 thoughts on “Editing is tedious, part 2

  1. Workin on the edits! Sorry its taking me awhile to get them in. I’m enjoying the heck outta this story, even a second time through (hard for me to enjoy a re-read, since I know what’s going to happen, which usually takes all the fun out of a story)! I’d love to hear about Lag’s, Kominski’s, and the rest’s komenagen, and maybe more about Taj’s time with the monks, those should make for some interesting tales.

    • And I thank you very much for your efforts and inputs.
      I have a very good idea about how Lag (any guesses on his first name?) and Kaminski’s komenagen went, but I’m still trying to figure what exactly Harbin being a punk and passing with only an 8 looks like. One advantage of the Komenagen stories is they could potentially make great juvenile or young-adult fiction, addressing issues of adulthood, rights, etc. Sort of like Tunnel in the sky. Taj’s creation and early years could be very interesting, but I’d have to make sure I get the real future history timeline nailed down rock solid before I do that.

      • Heh. As long as his name isn’t something like “Jet”, I think I’d be pretty okay with it. Stenson’s past would be interesting, too, all sorts of opportunity for mechanical hijinx to happen around him, and isn’t there a corporal or sergeant who has hinted at a “misspent youth”?

        • Actually, I almost gave Stenson a different name. Macpherson. Strut Macpherson. And I also never did find a good spot to put the “diaper-matic 6000” baby-changer machine (with a very surprised-looking infant being dunked into it).

  2. If nothing else, the history of the Taj could be written in email-like snippets at the beginning of chapters of the next book, if you could tie it into the story some how.

    • You mean, sort of a chapter intro quote? Hmm. Interesting idea. Have to think about it, but if done well, it could be darn interesting.

  3. If I may. Another opportunity for future story lines might lie in the details of a future where perhaps Quinn has become the Taj’s Captain, while Helton and Quiri’s child (daughter?) is Pilot and Allonia and Kaminski’s offspring (twins?) are members of the crew or crew a sister Amadillo.

    Also the Planet Mover did say something about looking forward to a future time where his and Helton’s grandchildren (or was it children?) could play together in Taj.

  4. How many words/pages is this work shaping up to be? Did you post the final adventure or are you planning to add more chapters?

    • As I said earlier, I’ve not posted the ending. It’ll be in the book, which is now about 177k words, according to MS Word. But, in part because of all the “cut to” and “INT – DAY” and “SGT” sorts of things, the average word length is only 4.6 letters. I likely could have added a lot more words if I wanted, and there are a couple of places it wouldn’t be a bad thing, entirely, but it’s complete enough, now, I think, so I’m just beating the grammar and formatting into shape at this point. Pages? In Word, using mostly 11 pt Calibri and 1″ margins on 8.5×11 paper, it’s 343, including drawings, title page, table of contents, etc.

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