Last week, I finished my line edit of HYBRID draft 5 and am now adding in the edits to what will be draft 6. I’m hoping to have this polishing stage done within the next couple of weeks.
Current MS word count: 64,111
I think the line edit I just did tightened up the prose a lot, so I’m excited to see what the final word count is once I’ve made all my changes.
This week, I soldiered on with my line edit of draft 5. I’m getting close to the end of this draft!
Current progress: page 161 of 199
This week, I continued my line edit of Draft 5. It’s still been difficult to find a consistent time to do it, but I’ve been pulling it out every time I have a spare moment and I’m really happy with my progress. I’m hoping to be finished with this draft in the next week or two, but sooner if I can carve out the time to do it.
Current progress: page 148 of 199
During the past two weeks, I have continued my line edit of Draft 5 to polish at the sentence level. This part of the process has been a lot of fun, especially because I prefer to make notes for sentence-level revisions by hand, so I’ve gotten the chance to re-familiarize myself with all the copyeditor’s marks I learned in the editing minor at BYU. Maybe it’s dorky that I find that fun, but whatever.
It’s been difficult to find the time to write because my maternity leave ended last week and I went back to work part-time, so between working and taking care of my son, there isn’t a lot of downtime. It’s mostly just sneaking in 5 minutes here and there, so work on this draft has been slower than I’d like. But I know I’m not the only writer who has to do it this way.
The PDF I’m editing is 199 pages. I’ll use that to track my progress through this draft, since I won’t be able to see my MS wordcount until I’ve made all the edits in Scrivener.
Draft progress so far: page 132 of 199
I’m back!!
I know I disappeared on here for a lo-o-o-ong time. It was for a good reason, though. I had a baby!
It turns out that being an expectant mother for 9 months and then being a new parent immediately after that is wonderful, but also busy and exhausting, so during that time I took a break from updating the writing blog and decided to just focus on the important stuff–my baby, and the writing itself.
During the past year, this is what I accomplished:
I am now in the process of polishing Draft 5 at the sentence level. This polished draft will become Draft 6. Once it’s done, I will be at a point where I don’t know how else to improve the manuscript (though I will be the first to admit that it is far from perfect!).
Which means that it will be time to proceed to the Querying Stage.
That’s too scary to think about though, so for now, my updates will focus on the task at hand: polishing! Which is my favorite part of the revision process.
Michela Hunter 