I've been earnestly editing Seafear over the past few days. My goal is to do a chapter a day, but that's obviously falling to the wayside. I generally do a chapter in a sitting, which takes me about two hours. I have a pad of sticky notes, and I go through and read, line by line, and I mark anything that needs changing.
The majority of the changes I'm making right now are due to awkward phrasing. I think I've encountered the word "lad" enough in the past 70 pages that I want to shoot myself for ever having thought it a good, affectionate term for the older pirates to call my main character. I've gotten so sick of it by this point that I've just started excising it whenever I see it. A majority of the 33 times it occurs are in the first half of the book, the one that took me eight months to write sporadically. It only occurs twice in the second half (which I wrote in the course of a month).
Editing is obnoxious. Reading your own writing is interminably boring, and I can think of a billion things I'd rather do than read this book again (although I'm guessing I'll have to read it at least twice more before I start sending it out for publication). Which is probably why I'm blogging right now instead of doing what I should be doing.
Still looking for a layout... I imagine, in the dim and distant future, I'll want to incorporate this blog into my author website. Which I need to make. I miss having Microsoft FrontPage, because that WYSIWYG program worked really well for me, even if it was really, really, really bland.
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