No forward progress last night. I didn't have much time and I went back into chapter 1 to clean a few things up. For one, I can't believe how many times I messed up it's and its. I understand why I make the mistake, typing 's is just reflexive when doing a possessive. But, wow, I just don't see them when I read over unless I'm very careful. That's going to be tough, I mentally fix things when I read and don't catch mistakes easily.

My wife also gave me some good tips from some of her research. Be on the watch for sentences that use 'was' since they can typically be written stronger. Also, and I already sort of knew this but got lazy a couple of times, be on the watch for when I tell what emotion a character is experiencing.

The chapter 2 revision is going to be a tough one. There is a lot of information to convey about the setting and backstory. The backstory I think I can break up a bit and push back parts to be conveyed in smaller chunks over time. The setting is tougher, I need to find a balance between excessive narrative and still getting enough across to give the reader a mental image.

When I do editing, I keep a list of all the consistent misuses and misspellings, then I use the Find tool to look for every one. If it's something that's always wrong, like the way I put "hte" for "the", I do Find and Replace.

That is a good idea. I should definitely search on "it's" when I get the first revision done. It will take time to go through all the legit ones, but worth it to catch 'em.

This is the aggravating part of revisions-- questioning what's really important. I'm so freakin' familiar with the story and the characters, I'm kind of losing sense of flow.

Oh well, I'ma just wing it and hope for the best.

Hey, Gud, I just wanted to say I read it and it's great. Busy day today, so I likely won't get to the detailed comments right away, but I didn't want to leave you hanging.

I really like the story, and I want to know what happens next! Which is good.

Thanks! Don't feel any need to hurry, I'll be chewing on chapter two of the first draft for a bit. I'm expecting that one to be hard.

Chapter three of the first draft will be more fun. I think chapter three is one of the better chapters of the first draft along with 5,8,9,11,12,15,16,17,18,24,28,30, and 31. 1,2,7,10,13,20,29 are the trouble makers. 30 and 31 will be a lot of work anyhow since it's the ending.

I applaud you, Gud. I hate revision with a passion, unless I have those lightbulb moments of, "Oh! He should have said THAT!"

And I tend to self-edit as I go, which is ... good and bad.

It probably helps that I'm new to trying to write something that is, well, decent. I'm learning a lot as I go. It makes things more interesting.

And I tend to self-edit as I go, which is ... good and bad.

This is also me.

Although I will say, I am slashing and burning through the darlings with abandon at the moment. I can be rather ruthless when I set my mind to it. I've added something like two thousand new words, but right now, I only have a net gain of about five hundred words, if that tell you anything.

I'm on revision chapter 4. My wife convinced me to put in a new chapter break so revision chapter 1 has been split into two chapters. Then I finished the revision chapter 3 in which I used two paragraphs from the rough draft, yay! One of them had to be reworded though.

I'm rocking revision chapter 4 now. I've actually been able to cut and paste a fair amount of stuff in from draft chapter 2. I usually need to do a bit of rewording but it's still faster than generating all new stuff.

Revision chapter 5 will be all new, but then I'll hit revision chapter 6 and that should pretty much just be smoothing out stuff from the draft.

This puts me at around 6,000 words in the revision. At the same position of the story in the draft I had around 8,000 words.