My Manuscript is complete!
Yeehaw! Yes, this is me doing the happy dance!! I officially finished my second manuscript this morning and it feels EXCELLENT! Okay, it felt so good I actually teared up because I DID IT!
Now, I'm waiting hear back from my critique friends as to what they think and then send to my editor. YES! Throw my hand in the air in a sign of triumph.
What do you do after you complete a manuscript?? Go to Disney World?! NOT!
You edit. Yes, you've been doing that all along, but now you do the nasty search for those passive voice sentences, and as my father like to point out (too many contractions).
And yup, already did that today. Let me tell you, 318 pages takes a long time to go through to make certain you caught all the bad stuff. Hours and hours. And even after I went through once, I had MSFT Word do the grammar check on it and of course it still found some leftovers.
Anyway, big sigh. I feel good, no great, no flippin' fantastic! I did it, I did it!! Be jealous.
Now I gotta come up with the next in the series. :-) My hero Jake is going to take center stage. Stay tuned.
2 comments:
Your father does not like the use of contractions because they do not add emphasis when needed and the fact that contractions were just an academic adjustment to accommodate lazy journalists through the elimination of very few key strokes. Unfortunately, they now dominate our common language whenever possible.
See, this is why I have my father as an editor. And actually, aftergoing through the book twice on edits the other day before sending to my publisher I removed even more contractions. Two reasons (besides respecting my Dad's opininon), there were better ways of constructing the sentence (less passive) which contractions contribute to, and removing the contraction, as my father indicated did add more emphasis. And when you're writing suspense you want that.
So. . .thanks Dad! I'll keep you as my editor.
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