Special delivery! I just got my manuscript for The Van Helsing Incursion back from the editor in the mail. So guess what I’ll be doing this weekend? That’s right, doing some editing!
Revisions
The Grand Remodeling
What’s this? Is that a freshly printed manuscript of the Grand for copy editing? Yes! After the bulk of the heavy lifting was done with my latest work, I decided to follow some advice and work on remodeling my book.
How? As you might be able to tell from the image, this manuscript features dates accompanying major changes in era. This will hopefully make things easier for people to follow along.
This manuscript also features a heavy rewrite of the chapter which inspired the Van Helsing Paradox. A lot of changes were done in my latest work to clarify dialogue, so I felt these changes needed to be brought back to the source.
Once my copy editor is done with her changes, I will make sure to re-release eBooks and a print version to celebrate. Exciting!
Hmm, I wonder how many refills of red ink she will need?
The Van Helsing Paradox’s Pseudo Math
What does: 1 manuscript; 15 revision cycles; 17 chapters; 1350 annotations made during copy editing; and 63631 words add up to? Good question. The beginning of the end!
A Quick Revision Update
Since Revision 3 was completed on 22 Jan 2018, three more revisions were completed for the Van Helsing Paradox. These revisions all aimed at improving the overall readability of the manuscript.Of note there were 1827 revisions and a averaged 38 words between corrections for Revision 3. This followed the trends noted during my review of the Grand and that remains true with this project. The particulars of the cycles are as follows:Revision 4
- Revisions – 928
- Revisions per Word – 70
Revision 5
- Revisions – 825
- Revisions per Word – 78
Revision 6
- Revisions – 788
- Revisions per Word – 147
The Revisions per Word metric is the most telling, every additional revision leads to fewer corrections to make. While corrections do tend to be grouped together in the manuscript, I can now read pages at a time without making any notes. This trend is expected to continue until the Revisions to make number under 100. That’s normally my cue to send it off to my editor for polish prior to release.
The Van Helsing Paradox – Revision 3
Given my schedule for the next couple of months, I decided forgo my normal pause. Putting my revisions on hold would have me revising the Van Helsing Paradox during a business trip and that would have been fairly disruptive.
Revision 3 is now complete and I ended up with about 500 less revisions. There was an increase of 350 words despite the there being a net loss for most chapters. Two additional scenes were added to describe Clara physically, which led to a net increase. Revisions are getting smaller in scope and I rarely need to rewrite a few sentences are rewritten.
So what does this tell me? That I am on track. While this revision is far from perfect, my metrics are improving and I plan to restart the process end February.