Today is a milestone in the timeline of the novel formerly known as "Goodbye Grammarian". Yesterday, I exported the project from yWriter5 into a single RTF document. All the notes on plots and scenes, the character sketches, the chapter descriptions, the "To Do" lists, the revisions... all the scaffolding and detritus that goes into writing a novel was left behind. The new RTF file contains only the 113,188 words of text that the reader will see. It went into a brand new folder in Dropbox.
But yesterday wasn't the milestone.
Today is the milestone because, when I needed to go into the book to fix some typos, I didn't open up yWriter5, my preferred software for writing. I opened MS Word to edit the RTF directly. Also, I ran a full spelling and grammar check on the text, made sure the whole thing is formatted consistently with 12 pt Times New Roman, and gave it page numbers and line numbers. Not only that, I formatted the first page to submission-standard, including typing out the new title.
Today is a milestone because today is the day that I stop writing and editing this book. Today is the day that I begin formatting this book for submission and querying.
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But yesterday wasn't the milestone.
Today is the milestone because, when I needed to go into the book to fix some typos, I didn't open up yWriter5, my preferred software for writing. I opened MS Word to edit the RTF directly. Also, I ran a full spelling and grammar check on the text, made sure the whole thing is formatted consistently with 12 pt Times New Roman, and gave it page numbers and line numbers. Not only that, I formatted the first page to submission-standard, including typing out the new title.
Today is a milestone because today is the day that I stop writing and editing this book. Today is the day that I begin formatting this book for submission and querying.
===== Feel free to comment on this or any other post.
Yea! Ever, ever closer. And, it's a good feeling to reach that point.
ReplyDeleteWhen I handed mine over to my copy-editor it marked the end of "fiddling" - although just before I printed it out, I changed ONE word.
Congratulations on reaching the milestone, Tony.