82.3

Primary edit is done, and as of last word count, came up just slightly to 82 thousand words. I am tempted to edit out 1/4 of the references and words and described stuff. Might pull it down around 70K. But I feel is better to learn from this and do different next time.

Funny. I've heard it said many times research is like an iceberg. You need to know more than what you put on the page. Well, sure, but what I found this time is I have to read so much before I grasp the overall shape, especially of a location I want to set a scene, I've learned far too many details. To get enough of a sense of the ferry to write the basic movements and other key events, I ended up having so many details in my mind that even when I left most of it off the page I still ended up talking way too much about carpets.

Anyhow. Now I've got ProWritingAid fired up and I'm doing line edit. And I've got a bit of a rant stored up.

Not about the software, or that particular process. Sure, it is flagging me for passive voice to hell and gone, because it is designed to edit business presentations and I'm writing archaeology. "Ancient stones were stacked in low rambling walls" is better than, "We stacked the stones," sorry!

Yeah, sure, I changed a couple. "They forged it..." was stronger in the particular circumstance than "It was forged...," for instance.

This is also work I can't take to the cafe, because I need the full laptop with internet connection. The software uses an online brain. And I need to have a web browser to check on things like the use of the ellipses in written dialog (the sort of thing that, as useful as Strunck & White is, it doesn't cover.)

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No, my rant is on something about editing.

Here it is. You go anywhere where advice is given to writers, they all say "Pay a human editor." I basically agree with this. Hell, even in my specific circumstances I'm pretty sure they are right. A human editor is worth that much to your career (for this book, it doesn't make financial sense, but if for some reason it does get eyeballs then I am tainting my readership if the editing is obviously lacking.)

But here's the thing. These same advice-givers point out that an editor will catch "all those mistakes" in tense, point of view, plot holes, character names changing midway through the manuscript, misspelled words and common substitutions.

And this is where I part company. No, seriously. You are going to write a NOVEL, from 60 to 120 thousand words, and you don't understand verb tenses? You don't understand POV? You haven't figured out that when a red squiggle appears under a word in the software you are using, it means you may want to look at the spelling?

You know, really? I don't believe it. Not at entry level. Up at the leader level, a book goes through a professional line editor who sends back a marked proof and the writer then spends months going through every passive voice or cliche or dangling participle that editor has flagged to decide whether the needs of the story are great enough to break the rule of grammar here.

These are structural insights software can't make, though. At best, software can flag everything that fails a small number of rules doggedly applied. I mean, I've got a line that contains "...kind of weird..." and the software I'm using thinks it should be "a kind" or "the kind." Grammatically correct, just not idiomatic. When I wrote that something had happened in the eighteenth century, it insisted it should be hyphenated, because of course I had to have mean AN "eighteenth-century" NOUN.

This is the kind of thing a well-paid human does. And the entire industry is having more and more trouble coming up with those people. It is getting to the point where editing is unaffordable. Daily newspapers gave up the battle a while ago, at least my eye tells me every time I run into another front page typo.

Which means a book that is earning in the tens of thousands. Has to be. For both the publisher and the writer to be able to afford the services and the time to have those details discussions about whether that specific error is one up with which they shall not put.

At the Kindle level? People are getting lifetime sales in the low hundreds. It doesn't make financial sense to do that kind of editing.

And, also, honestly? The people who are pushing a book out on Kindle and who don't understand how POV works...well, they've got bigger problems. The whole system has a basic flaw, really. The old gatekeeper scheme had problems but it did mean writers were kept in the trenches until they'd figured out the difference between First Person and Third Person and how to change viewpoint characters smoothly.

(If I might direct your attention -- I read the first two books out of a ten book series, and as of a sample chapter of book six or so the author was still head-hopping. But at least by book six he'd figured out what point of view was.)