Robert_Hart
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Tidying up
🕑 Added 2020-05-17 04:43:30 +0000 UTC
Yesterday I posted the final chapter of Through my Eyes. Again. to my Patreon. I am now busy on a final (I hope) pass through all nineteen chapters, checking spelling, grammar, imposing uniform formatting on book titles and foreign languages words and sentences (and deciding which ones require translations and which ones do not)…in other words the vital but boring ‘paperwork’ part of writing. Somewhat inevitably, re-reading what I have written for the umpteenth time leads to inevitable fiddling around the edges: a more apposite word choice here, a slight reordering of words there. Interestingly, some sections attract more fiddling than others – which suggests to me that some parts of my writing ‘flowed’ more fluently than most of the rest, which required some – or a lot of – wrangling.
And whilst this is going on, I have a helpful reader pointing out to me that MI5 would not have been the UK security organisation dealing with Col and Mutti Frida, but MI6. MI5 is concerned with domestic security issues as opposed to MI6 handling international issues. When Mutti Frida and Col arrived in the British sector of West Germany, they would have ended up talking to MI6 and Mr Watling, Mutti Frida’s contact, and his trilby hat would have worked for MI6. So now I must go back over the chapters to find that problem and fix every occurrence … which leads to more temptation to tinker with the text.
I asked an author who has given her time to me quite generously at what point she decided that a book was ‘done’. She, perhaps with some tongue in cheek, replied that it is finished when ‘you get sick of looking at it and evict it from your life’. TMEA is perhaps approaching that point, but there is still work to do, such as the ebook version of TMEA, for which I am using Scrivener. This is a huge program for authors and I am slowly getting to grips with its incredibly wide feature set. For this, there is some cover art in production and the ebook will have to wait for that to complete.
All this is happening underneath ‘real life’ – with all its Covid-19 complications, difficulties and anxiety as we Australians (state by state) become guinea pigs in the experiment that is our release from lock down. Given the behaviour being reported this weekend, I am not optimistic that we will avoid a second wave and a return to lock down in our capital cities.
But, in the depths, there are new story ideas bubbling away at a low simmer.
