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The editing: ‘looking’ at issues
🕑 Added 2020-10-17 23:03:10 +0000 UTCMy editor returned the text of Through my Eyes. Again. in under 10 days – much faster than I had expected – and I am now working on a myriad of suggestions. The first result of this is that Chapter 6 of the sequel Through Different Eyes has languished and still exists in outline only – my apologies. As we are also fast approaching the end of a truly chaotic, Covid-19 impacted Academic year here in Australia, my free writing time will be further reduced. I am however determined to get the draft of chapter 6 out before Christmas – after all, editing things like comma usage can be mind-numbing and I will need creative breaks.
One of the issues raised by my editor was to examine every use of the word ‘look’ (and its variants such as ‘looked’, ‘looking’ etc) as I had perhaps overused it. I have lost count of the times I have read through TMEA – but I hadn’t noticed that problem, so it couldn’t be a big issue. I loaded up the complete text in Word and told it to search for ‘look’ – 953 occurrences it dispassionately advised me. My brain leapt out of my skull and did a quick, yammering circuit of the house. In a twenty-chapter book, that is nearly fifty occurrences per chapter and approaching 1% or the total word count.
Once I had recovered a modicum of balance, I gritted my teeth and set to working this issue. Upon examination, some of the offending sentences can just be pruned as not advancing the story. Others required a minor rewording – but some necessitated deep thought and reworking across several sentences and occasionally paragraphs. After 8 chapters, I have reduced the ‘look’ and variants to 503 and the task continues. The current record is eight occurrences on one page and I have found only a single occurrence that cannot be changed – a reference to Alice’s looking glass.
My excellent editor has pointed out a number of other issues – such as ‘show, don’t tell’ in a few places, a possible pruning of a particular content type and several ideas for extension related to a couple of characters.
This is going to keep me busy for a while…
