Because I moved from POV chapters to one central file a bit early (in order to make keeping word count easier, and thus checking against daily goals easier), the book began to grow in ways that ran counter to temporal sequence.<\/p>\n
Or, more simply, it was\/is a mess.<\/p>\n
What I needed was a printout.\u00a0\u00a0 By this week, I desperately<\/em> needed a printout.\u00a0 Usually I start doing a printout earlier, but for reasons A – R, that didn’t work for me this time.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And printing out 780+ pages takes a) time,\u00a0 b) lots of paper,\u00a0 c) lots of printer cartridge, and d) even more time to punch holes in the sheets so they’ll go in the two big fat 3-ring binders that I use to move chapters around.<\/p>\n Time I didn’t have, not and get the first draft done and through first-ordering before the start of rehearsals for the Durufl\u00e9 “Requiem”, which start a week from Saturday.\u00a0\u00a0 Rehearsing Durufl\u00e9 means having to listen to it, over and over, and Durufl\u00e9 is not first-drafting music for me.\u00a0 Learned that last time we did it.\u00a0 Tried a little on the trip to Dragon*Con, and sure enough–Durufl\u00e9 shuts down the Plot Daemon.<\/p>\n So I remembered that way last spring, I had Kinko’s\/FedEx make me a copy of the copy-edited ms (with my marks) for later reference.\u00a0\u00a0 I looked online.\u00a0 Sure enough…they can print from an emailed file.\u00a0\u00a0 I called for a price, gulped, and shipped off the file (shorter this morning than this afternoon)\u00a0 to be printed and hole-punched.\u00a0 Then I kept writing, and more story appeared.<\/p>\n This afternoon, on the way to the city for a) fencing lesson and b) diagnostic consult on what was wrong with Serendipity (one of the new external hard drives), I stopped by the FedEx store and picked up 784 neatly printed and hole-punched pages, waved plastic at the little plastic-reader.\u00a0 Sometimes technology is wonderful (emailing a very rough first draft and having it magically reappear as paper ready for the binders) and sometimes technology is a PITA (Serendipity went blank for no apparent reason.\u00a0 Another trial is warranted.)<\/p>\n I’ve now made a note of four rough temporal divisions into which all chapters will be stuffed tomorrow.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It will then be time to look at the wordage left, the temporal gaps to be filled, and make decisions about the divisions in which there is Too Much Stuff.<\/p>\n Though it’s after midnight now, with a lot to be accomplished tomorrow, it’s still hard to leave the printout in its box, and not start re-ordering chapters right this minute.\u00a0\u00a0 When I get them reordered in print,\u00a0 and mark the obvious fixes (square brackets with [findaname] inside being among those),\u00a0 then I can move things in the computer, and THEN I’ll have a sequence that should make some sense for alpha readers,\u00a0 while I tackle the end game for this volume.\u00a0\u00a0 (No, we can’t stop here<\/em>, because that’s a very unsatisfying place to stop!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Because I moved from POV chapters to one central file a bit early (in order to make keeping word count easier, and thus checking against daily goals easier), the book began to grow in ways that ran counter to temporal sequence. Or, more simply, it was\/is a mess. What I needed was a printout.\u00a0\u00a0 By […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[20,107],"class_list":["post-900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-writing-life","tag-progress-report","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=900"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":901,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900\/revisions\/901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}