annathepiper | Entries tagged with lament: fourth draft

I haven’t heard anything out of anyone besides eveshka, so if any of you all have anything to say to me about the novel, do please let me know tonight if possible. If you don’t have anything you think is a shipstopper, I want to get the thing sent off to Ms. Fox tomorrow!

Thanks again for all your help, folks. It is very, very much appreciated!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Thanks again for all your help, folks. It is very, very much appreciated!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

So if you happened to be thinking, “Hey Anna, I’d love to beta read Lament of the Dove for you, only I don’t have it on my Kindle/Sony Reader/iPhone running Stanza or some other appropriate Mobi-friendly reader app”, worry no more. seattlesparks has your back!

She’s kindly converted my RTF file for Lament into Mobi format and informs me that it can be “just drag-and-dropped into a Kindle’s ‘documents’ directory, or sync’d onto a Sony Reader, or used with Stanza on the Mac or on an iPhone, etc.”

All props to seattlesparks! And if anybody wants this version of the file, sing out and I’ll fire it your way. Formatting may not be perfect but it should be readable!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

All in all, not quite to the full 20K edited out, but I did make it down to 118K or so. So I’ll take this and run with it!

This means, folks, that Lament of the Dove’s fourth draft is now open for beta reading. As I’ve mentioned, I only need people to read through it and make sure that it holds together. In-depth proofreading is not required (although sure, if you see any typos or anything, call them out).

If at all possible I’d like to send the manuscript off to Ms. Fox by Monday of next week, so if you can read over the story this week, sing out. Throw me an email at my annathepiper gmail address, and let me know where I can send you the RTF to read. Thanks in advance, all!

Edited today: -467
Chapter 24 revised total: 5,925
Postlude revised total: 1,185
Lament of the Dove revised and final total (fourth draft): 118,358

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

… I emailed agent Diana Fox, who y’all may remember I last approached this past fall regarding Lament, to ask her whether it’s still okay for me to submit the revised version of the manuscript to her for consideration. She says yes.

This means I am now setting myself the goal to not only finish the edit pass on the fourth draft but also get it beta-read before solarbird, spazzkat, and I head to Disneyland on the 9th. I have four more chapters and an epilogue to finish editing, and thankfully at this point, I think I’ve passed all the bits that need major surgery. So it should be down to a question of word count reduction.

Y’all consider this an early warning then that I’m going to need a beta reader or three to sanity-check this thing for me before I fire it off at Ms. Fox. The level of effort required here would simply be to read over the manuscript and make sure it hangs together coherently–since I’ll have killed 20,000 words out of it, and in some places significantly tweaked events, I’ll need to make sure all of these changes have made it an overall leaner and meaner story. Significant tweaking in particular has been done with Faanshi’s portrayal, trying to strengthen her as a character, and I need to make sure that works too.

General proofreading will also be welcome but not required.

So if anybody thinks they may have free cycles in the week or so before July 9th and will have time to chug through about 117K worth of novel, let me know!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

This means I need to beat up on Lament of the Dove some more.

Fortunately, my brain’s come back enough that this is an option. I’ve actually made significant progress on Chapter 19; there’s some stuff that still needs to happen to polish this file up, but the end is in sight on it now. Soon I’ll be able to proceed to Chapter 20, which also promises to give a few editing challenges given how much I’ve had to do with 19.

But then there’ll be 21, and I’ll be back to Kestar, and can hopefully spend just about all of that chapter doing a serious word count reduction. I still have about 5K to kill, and I’ve got five more chapters and an epilogue in which to do it.

Edited as of Wednesday: -413
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,330
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 122,029

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Last night I did get in another paragraph in Lament which should be accounted for here. But now that I’ve gotten in the changes for Faerie Blood finally, Lament just dropped hard down the priority queue. We’ll see how this changes over the next couple of weeks, but at least through the weekend, I expect to be spending all my energy on FB.

Lament of the Dove:
Edited last night: +75
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,743
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 122,442

Faerie Blood:
Edited tonight: Reviewed changes for one chapter! 22 chapters to go.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Hit the bottom of page 13 in Chapter 19 of Lament tonight, and have finally gotten to a point where all this nice new content I’m throwing into this chapter can re-weave in with what’s already there. Which hopefully means that as of tomorrow night’s editing, I can start pulling this chapter’s unruly word count back under control. The word count I need to kill is back up to 5,500 or so, which is just not acceptable given that I’m still aiming at 117K.

Heh, “tomorrow night’s editing”, she says. Feeling pretty optimistic about holding to that, actually, now that my brain seems to pulling out of sleep dep mode. We’ll see what I can do.

Edited tonight: +209
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,668
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 122,367

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Not that I’m making any promises or anything–I’m still coming back online after that last round of surgery–but tweaking my thyroid meds intake has had the happy, happy result of giving me back some brain. Which in turn has been giving me back some sleep.

Some of this is coming in also from my old Pern fan group making noises about resurrecting itself, a possibility that has made my muse suddenly perk up; I’ve got a bunch of old characters from that group whose stories I never finished properly telling. I’m finding myself wondering whether I could use the prospect of rewarding myself with working on some of those old stories if I make good progress on finishing up Lament of the Dove’s edit pass so I can get the damn thing queried again. Right now, I’ll take any inspiration I can get.

And this weekend, over yesterday and today, I actually made some progress on Chapter 19, so some kind of inspiration is happening. The word count is still going up–but I’m adding a lot of new content to this chapter. I suspect I’ll be balancing out this increase though once I plow into Chapter 21, the next Kestar chapter, which is quite long.

Cross your fingers for me anyway, folks. I may, just may, be back.

Edited yesterday and today: +536
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,459
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 122,158

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

In all the fun I’ve had with breast cancer for the last many months (and by “fun” I mean “experiences I would like to never, ever have to do again”), it’s been easy to forget that I’ve also got no thyroid. Which means that if I don’t have my thyroid meds at the exact right level, my brain skews off. It becomes harder to focus. It becomes harder to sleep, which in turn contributes to the whole focusing problem. And that, of course, makes it harder to write. Which gets me stressed on top of being scatterheaded and tired, which makes it even harder to write. A nasty cycle, all around.

I’m taking two thyroid meds right now: T4 and T3. T3 is the more powerful thyroid hormone, and my dosage is between one and two tablets of that per day as needed. A dogged little corner of my brain chimed up finally and went “so, uh, hey, maybe back off the T3 a bit?” So I tried that.

And I’ve slept well enough the last couple of nights that I’ve recovered enough brain to make it through another page of editing Lament of the Dove. Not only that, but to also put in a little bit of a callback to Faanshi and Julian’s first meeting, one which Julian does on purpose, and which is supposed to signal his reaching a turning point in his relationship with Faanshi. Here’s hoping I gave it the right words.

Edited tonight: +230
Chapter 19 revised total: 4,923
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,622

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.