The first draft is complete and now the technical part starts. I’ve gotten a little of that done, but will have to wait until the end of the semester to really start working. It shouldn’t take too long though; I learned a lot from the first novel.
My first step was to print the first draft on paper. I’m old fashioned and rely on my reading glasses. That gave me chance to read through and make notes of things that needed changed. The notes cover the obvious editing issues, but also include comments about story or character weaknesses that need to be addressed.
Once the paperwork was done, I started transfering the editing to the electronic version. I made a new copy of the document so I wouldn’t risk damaging the original. As a computing professional, I cannot stress how important it is to make backups and to have restore points.
While working this second draft, I started a couple of new documents and opened another for editing. The new ones include a chapter/scene list and a list of locations. The existing one was the character list. These tools are a great help when making sure I didn’t do anything stupid.
The chapter or scene list is a list of the chapters in my book in the order in which they appear in the text. Most chapters are attached to a single scene, with a few exceptions. This list includes the time when the event happened in the story, the title of that chapter, and any other important notes. This helps be double check the timing in the story world to keep it consistent and realistic. The titles help make sure I don’t use the same title more than once and to make sure they don’t form an unfortunate pattern.
The location list also helps with consistency. Each location has a name and any necessary notes. This lets the characters visit places repeatedly while not messing up the details. Once I’m done with the second draft, I will do an Internet search to see if the place names show up. Any that do may be renamed to avoid conflicts and rights issues. Since any name will be consistent throughout the novel, it will be relatively easy to use the find feature to replace the old name with the new.
On the Barnes and Noble website, a reader comment for the first novel mentioned that some of the character names gave a little confusion because there were too many of them. That won’t be the case in the second. There are fewer characters. Also, the name list allows me to review the names to make sure each is sufficiently different. For example, there is an important character named Harv, but there was a minor character named Marv. This posed a confusion risk, so Marv found himself renamed. Without the character list, this may have been more difficult to see. If I really wanted to look things over, I could use a SOUNDEX function, but I’m a little lazy.
Those initial fixes will be good, but there will need to be some larger changes too. I noticed that some of the scenery lacked depth to a notable degree. There are things I want to add to help with the main guy’s character arc. The first draft was about sixty thousand words, but the new material will take it closer to seventy. That’s a good, readable size for the casual reader.
It’s only a few weeks until the end of the semester. I think I’m in a good place to get this finished and polished before the middle of summer. If my artist comes through on the cover, this could be rolling off the press in a few months.