Hot on the chase

Hot weather and smoke alert. And we don't do air conditioning around here. The swamp cooler took the edge of things when it got desperate but it was lousy weather to be running computer and dual monitors and pushing hard.

Except I'm getting there. I've done most of the re-writes and tracked in some of the changes I wanted to do as well. And I've been pushing it through ProWritingAid as I go.

(ProWritingAid was unhappy about the diary scenes, as those were open-end paragraphs as per the style manuals. But it also got nasty about elisions for dialect when they happened within a quote; every time I had something like "Canny bag o' Tudas, man!" it would flag that as having failed to close the single quotes before closing the double quotes.)

Down to Part IV and the last 12,000 words of the novel. Even started the upload process, putting in category keywords and blurb into Kindle.

The biggest chunk of rewrite text will go easy. That's the extended tomb crawl. I'll just pop my Royal Philharmonic recording of music from the first Tomb Raider games -- that I joined the Kickstarter on -- on headphones and type away.

The Geordie Final Exam is a bit more work. I've got a dozen different pages of Geordie slang open right now, including two different translation widgets (neither of which does that much). Did I mention I took a quiz on "How well do you know Geordie" and scored 11 out of 16?

Re-did the pencils for the interior graphics as well. If I continue at this pace, I can be ordering my Pre-release copies before I go back to work Tuesday.

But, boy. Even without turning on the switches that explicitly search for the stuff, I'm noticing a lot of repeated patterns in my writing. Similar sentence structure. Similar turns of phrase cropping up over and over. Good thing they are getting flagged as passive voice (since it is after all a story, not a business report, there are a lot of those flags. Which gives me a chance to re-visit some of them and say, hey, maybe this one character here doesn't say "in a manner of speaking" or "some of the others" or other stock constructions I'm over-using.

But ye gods, those commas. I can't afford the time to really dig into each and every one, and I don't have the grammar to quite understand what I'm doing wrong, so I'm having to, over and over, make a flash decision about whether to preserve Penny's breathless, run-on construction or to make it more grammatical.

Sigh. I'm adding that to the list for the Japan book; that Penny will be for most of it trying to speak more professionally (she's stuck playing her character for most of the book) and I can have fun contrasting it with her narrative voice.

In fact, the reverse has been the intent for two books now. That the narrative is slightly more professional (or her dialog is exceptionally flighty). The place where it really helped on this book is that the Londoners are mostly speaking in proper sentences so Penny's voice contrasts nicely.

Because otherwise my whole cast sounds alike. Even the Geordies.

No More Tribbles

I've been having a real problem with Fox and Hounds. 

I constructed it as a stealth plot. It is what I call a "Tribble" plot, after David Gerrold's excellent description of how he constructed that fabulous Star Trek episode; things are happening on the surface and they look important but every now and then the camera cuts away to the tribbles getting more and more numerous...until suddenly everyone realizes the tribbles are the real plot.

The problem I'm hitting is that this is Penny floundering in Field School and finding London confusing, and Graham is dragging her out on a rather "Steed and Mrs Peel" series of interviews with colorful local characters.

Which means the poor reader is presented with a whole bunch of stuff and no way of knowing what of it is supposed to be important.

Part of this is intentional, and something I mean to continue: I call it out explicitly in this book as something The Doctor does (Doctor Who); that there are all these things happening that look like background detail or throwaways until at the climax one of them matters.

In the television series Eureka this is multiple and blatant. Last episode I remember watching, there was a new computer gizmo being tried out that predicted disasters before they happened. One of the ones it tried to warn about was a leak of cooling gel in one of the labs, and it looks like the gag was entirely about the Sherif Carter getting it dumped all over him. Except at the climax, the computer core is running so hot it is predicting that it, itself, is about to overheat and explode...and they save the day by dumping the cooling gel all over it.

Well, the way I've constructed Fox and Hounds, it it 16K words before The Blitz is brought up, 21K before the dig at the air raid shelter begins, 33K before they got shot at and realize there really is a mystery afoot. Graham isn't even brought on screen before 10K, and the connection between his Roman Coin problem and the Nine Elms dig, although hinted at, isn't made explicit until 60K (out of 77K current draft.)

That's because it is unfolding as a mystery plot. But there's no backbone. It is fine if Spenser walks around Boston for fifty pages before finding anything out, because he goes into the story knowing he is on a case. Penny doesn't know she's on an adventure. She even calls this out right at the top of the story; "I'm here for school."

So my editing problem now is to reveal the tribbles. To put in more of those scenes David Gerrold described where it is obvious that despite all the running around after Klingons and annoying Federation Trade Representatives, there is something important building.

And as of this moment, the best way I can think to do it is to make it Penny's perception as well. To have her actively addressing the idea that school isn't fulfilling enough and despite wanting to leave Athena Fox behind and become a real archaeologist, she'd love to have some interesting historical problem to dig into.

***

I complained before about how easy it is to put everything on the nose. I avoided doing that. But that means the historical focus is weak.

Story starts at the ancestral home of Lady Jane, the Nine Days Queen. There's a few random bits but the next big chunk of history is Armistice Day and the Great War.

With Nine Elms the focus finally zooms into the Blitz, specifically, 1941. That's an all-sides envelopment; the Blitz Experience walk-though exhibit at the Museum, cosplay as Ack-Ack Girl, the dig, the discovery of Linnet's diary.

But at the end of the dig there's an epic trek through Battersea Power Station as an artifact of the 20's (it isn't, but that's the main focus), then a trip to Shakespeare's Globe, before we finally go into the tunnels...but even then it is largely about Crossrail and a bit of Bazalgette and really not much of the Blitz at all.

So I've got some work trying to find a focus here.

Done

I am so done with editing. Heinlein said never to revise except under orders of an editor. I wouldn't go that far. I just can't deal with this one any more.

So I'm running the pages with the most changes through the spell/grammar checker. And then putting the revised text back up on Kindle.

Because I really need to work on the next one. Ones. Probably still the London book.

But I've moved the Military SF one to a front burner to simmer. I think I need to hit my Jason Covalito now. And that may lead me towards other references on the evolution of the horror genre. Which I'll somehow work in around the rest of my research.

Such as, if I'm going to be having a lot of locals talking like locals talk, then I should maybe sit down with a few seasons of Eastenders.

Can't even

The Battersea Power Station would be wonderful for a chapter I want in the London Book. Except, the Battersea in 2012 -- before the current consortium moved in and actually started construction.

Similarly, Aldwych Tube Station is almost perfect. Except for some major details I'd have to change.

And sure, why not? The point is to have fun with history and place. You want a chase scene across Tower Bridge or a sword fight on the Tower Greens, despite the fact that in the real world the Beefeaters would break it up instantly and the rest of the book would be about how much fun jail is.

And I need to put in more action. I need to get more exciting with history. I need to cross that line and have archaeological mysteries and interesting discoveries that aren't, quite, legit and mainstream.

That's not a slippery slope, though. That's a greased ramp on a C130 in flight.

***

Editing is not going well. Sure, I'm seeing lots of stuff I could clean up, or at least try to do better. Just this morning I threw out the second paragraph of the entire book and rewrote it almost from scratch. It gets better, but the sentence structure and basic narrative voice in the first half is, well, horrible.

But it feels pointless. The response from all the beta readers has been, "Hmm." Not positive. No. And same indicators from clicks and page downloads.

On that evidence I'd say this was a failure. The idea for the book didn't pan out. There's no point in even thinking about a sequel.

So write something else? Well, if I missed so badly on this, then doesn't that mean my instincts suck? Maybe not, but there's that general depression and doubt that makes all the ideas and half-starts in my files look thin and trite. I don't feel as if I can write any of them.

A book -- any creative idea -- takes on a life of its own. By which I mean it has a sort of strange integrity about it. A sum greater than the original parts. There is a sense of what fits and what doesn't. And I've lost that sense. I no longer feel like I have grasp of this whole to which adjustments can be made. Instead all my ideas are floating as fragments no bigger than themselves.

But I'm reading another "archaeological thriller." And I've read others. And I know the form, and I know what is in it. And I have to believe that what I created looks similar.

And that there is a market for it.

F, as in Johann Sebastian Bach

I got to the last page of grammar check. And then my dad turns in his notes.

Some of them are very dad notes. Which is to say they are the sort of thing I would have thought of, and worried endlessly about. The difference...the reason I have a book and he doesn't...is that I can after enough effort put them aside.

I have a "leg clad in lederhosen" at one moment and he worried about the fact that lederhosen only reach the knee. So is "leg" the right word, or should you say "thigh?"

Yeah, this is the sort of thing that would make me pause in the middle of writing a scene. But it is also the sort of thing I know doesn't matter to anyone but me.

Of course this is one of the biggest conundrums for a writer. You see the story from the inside. So you worry endlessly about justifying and explaining things that the reader will usually take for granted or not even notice are happening. Meanwhile the reader is worrying about things which are so obvious to you that you never thought they needed explanation...

Then he has to note that in German, the musical note we call "B," they call "H" (which is how Johann Sebastian was able to compose a tune around his own surname). This is, mind you, after giving me grief for putting too much in; too much detail, too many obscure things.

The context here is I have a character named Sharpe. That was entirely setup for a third act joke. And he was always going to have a stuck-up name anyhow, but making him Edward E. Sharpe let me make another joke about enharmonics; on the piano, E sharp is the same note as F natural, just as F flat is the same note as E natural. (They are actually different notes in theory, which is why the Germans use B for B flat and H for B.)

But no way that would go in the book. Heck, on the draft he saw, someone else nicknames the guy B flat -- the current draft changes it to F natural.

***

Dad gave me several useful notes which I've folded right in. These are largely places he read too fast and stumbled, but that's fine. I'd rather catch the stumblers than demand all the readers pay perfect attention.

He's also, though, opened my mind to some structural changes. As has the Writing Excuses podcast I was listening to at work today.

Big one being not frightening the horses -- I mean, first readers. The podcast put this in context; within the Kindle ecosystem, a lot of potential readers are going to pick up the first first pages for free to see if they like the book.

Well, the first few pages include one of the toughest info-dumps in the book. Or at least what looks like an info-dump. Either way, it can be heavy reading. It's the lecture on top the Acropolis, and Penny doesn't do this sort of thing again until the book is over half way done. But it sets up an expectation that the whole thing is going to be heavier weather than it really is.

So I simply need to savage the thing even more. That scene is doing three jobs; it is scene-setting Athens and the Classical era, it is showing Penny being working and being competent (nothing worse than starting with your protagonist doing nothing, just waiting for the adventure to start). And it was teeing up things, like the autochthonous origin of Athenians to the Gigantomachy, that will come into play later.

Well, I can screw the latter. I like having things repeat and having layers of resonance but I like having a book purchase more.

***

The other part of what is turning into yet another big edit is thinking about what fills the space. I've ranted before that people don't like description, don't like dialog, don't like mindless action. What exactly does that leave?

I mean, I've been trying to take one of the spices that defines this book and, really, my style out of the thing. I can't just leave a space.

So what I want to try is to punch up the emotion. That goes into dad's notes as well; he had trouble with a couple of transitions and what punches them is not just making the facts clearer, but giving the emotional beat time to breath.

Penny is adjusting far too easily to getting stranded in the middle of Europe. Sure, she is focused on the way out and the text should follow that focus. But this is a place where I need to tell as well as show. I can't just let her emotions be inferred. I need her to own up to them.

So, once again, another edit.

These Rude Mechanicals, who never before now labored in their minds

I've done all the re-writing I can stand. Now is the mechanical work; running the entire thing through ProWritingAid again to catch any new mistakes.

Overall I am happy with that piece of software. It, like several other language tools, leverages an online databased and presumably a learning algorithm. Meaning it has to have an internet connection and it takes it a while to finish scanning a page. Means an edit session takes up most of a day, as there's a significant wait each time a new page is loaded. Which is where I'm finding the time to write this.

(The worst part of this is there is no progress bar. It is finished when it is finished. Many a time I've started editing, only to have new errors belatedly pop in as the algorithms continue to discover them).

But that also means it can handle things that would normally be a flag and laborious check. It recognizes famous names, oft-used quotations, place names, names from history, and foreign words. Some of these are not so easy to look up to verify.

Does mean there's a risk of SpellCheck error. If might have found, for instance, a word in the wrong language and thus failed to flag what is actually a mistake. It seems pretty intelligent about this, though; I've only caught it once or twice trying to fix something unrelated into a song title it thinks it recognizes or something.

Like all good tools, it flags and it lets you decide if you want the correction. The problem I have is that it hates passive tense and always flags it. It also makes some mistakes in dialog punctuation and it also doesn't always pick up idioms that include general-purpose words; I am often finding it marking me for subject-verb agreement on one word out of a compound that is, of course, in proper agreement. So I can't clear all the tags without a lot of extra work.

Fortunately, I'm using it off-line; it recognizes a Scrivener file and will happily open and even save to it, but for safety I aim it at a duplicate and make the actual corrections in the home file.

We have no cats, Kathleen!

I don't know if this is the right edit to do. But I can't look back.

Well, sure, technically I could. I have a saved copy, and the software I'm using allows me to do a line-by-line comparison. What is more accurate is that it doesn't make sense, not to me as a working artist, to do this. I can barely justify the edits I'm making. I can't justify double-thinking them.

And really, these aren't the edits I want to make. I want to focus in, but it can't be done without starting nearly from scratch. I can look back and I can say having a protagonist who knows a lot less out the outset, and who has more wrong ideas she has to unlearn, would be stronger. And to keep things hyper-focused on classical Greece (and some contemporary Greece), even past the point of realism; every name is a classical allusion, for instance.

Sure, I have two ships with names and one is Hermes and the other is Queen Parsisphae but... (and the bar on the Queen is named Metamorphoses...which is a reference not a lot of people are going to get, even if at the end of it I name-drop Circe.)

Thing is, Alexander and Macedon, the Roman Empire, and the Minoans (and Atlantis) are embedded so deeply in the plot as plotted I can't take them out or substitute them. Ariadne and the Atlantis Gallery are too central. The reception scene at the gallery is constructed around an Atlantis story.

It's too much to take out. So instead I'm chopping out the shorter bits. Any time I name-drop a historical incident or a location or a pop culture reference that can be excised without spilling blood, out it goes.

But I'm not replacing them with anything. So what I'm doing in effect is making the the story less rich. And, yes, having that stuff in there was intentional when I did it. I wanted to put across that my protagonist is well-read and that the world refuses to be simple. In fact, in the re-write I actually added a bit about the Frankish Tower, which a Victorian German (Heinrich Schliemann) demolished in his quest to restore the Athenian Acropolis to a Periclesian form.

That interplay and communication between different peoples and nations and periods and beliefs is a core element of the story. So going through and randomly taking out sentences that dared include "Byzantine" is not necessarily an improvement to the manuscript. Heck, I'm even intending to chop out "frustuck" when I get there (there is another reason; it allows me to move the bit to the Berlin novel).

***

I'm on slightly more sure ground with the other edits I'm doing. Basically my sentence structure can be garbage. I am conscious of Penny having a faux-naive voice, and putting on more of an academic/pedantic air when playing Athena Fox, but the narration -- which should straddle both -- slides too often into the merely inefficient or even convoluted.

Just this morning at the cafe -- the only productive part of this particular day -- I took an axe to;

One or two had bits of medieval garb on them. I caught a glimpse of a Mjolnir amulet around one neck. Asatru? Or maybe he was just really excited about the next Avengers movie. The scatter on the tables said they’d arrived before us and had been here long enough to privately celebrate what it was they’d accomplished. 

And replaced it with;

One or two had bits of medieval garb on. I caught a glimpse of a Mjolnir amulet. Pagan? Or maybe he was just really excited about the next Avengers movie. The litter on the tables said they’d arrived before us and had been here long enough for their own private champagne party.

And I'm on an adjective hunt. I had the wind put up me on those after a couple of discussions at Quora about dialogue tags. I'm lopping off every adjective that sticks its head out far enough for me to notice it.

It still isn't good. But I don't have, again, the heart or patience to do the whole thing. I already ran it through grammar check and multiple edit passes and one-and-a-fraction beta readers. I'd rather not create a whole new set of errors that need fixing.

Honestly, I'd rather write the next one. So I'm going to be very happy to get done with this edit and go back to that.

Kitchen Sink

I'm still clubbing stuff out. I've also re-written a line or two, trying to give Penny a younger voice. Sure, that's part of her experience of Becoming the Mask; as Athena Fox she speaks more like an academic, and as the book progresses the two voices should cross and mingle. Right now, though, it is just lines that don't feel right coming from a 24-year old. At least, one that doesn't immediately appear to be "on the spectrum."

So Konrad Lorenz is gone. As is Rutger Hauer. Two paragraphs worth of stuff about the Minoans. Another paragraph (this one just to tighten up a transition). A few more references I can't think of right now that were not historical or at least not close enough to the theme, or an aging pop-culture reference. The Eagle's Nest is gone, too...although it got replaced by an entire paragraph about The Sound of Music.

I didn't get finished this weekend, though. I'm just up to the chapter at the National Museum of Archaeology. That one is the biggest edit. Not so much because I want to remove extraneous stuff, per se. More that I have figured out ways to focus in more strongly on the themes of the story. On Penny's growing disillusionment with Heinrich Schliemann, learning about the Mycenaeans, and basically being a lot less the person who gets to lecture to the reader and more a person who learns things as the reader learns them.

***

So I got accused of trying to fit everything in. I can see why someone might think that. The experience was almost the other way around. Most of the work was in trying to leave things out. Or trying to find and focus in on the stuff that mattered and needed to be there.

Heck, there's a bit on the ferry where a character pops up to give a talk about sailboats. Is he there because I knew a bunch about sailboats and really wanted to unload it on the reader? Hell no. He's there because Penny is going to have to run one in a few chapters, and she needed the head's up. And so did the reader. And everything he says, I had to look up in order to write that scene.

(One of the few bits of experience I could have brought to the table is my grandfather, who hated the people who motored about instead of sailing and called those tall fishing boat things with the oversized engines "stink pots." But it didn't fit...the best I could do was have Terry mention he doesn't use the motor if he doesn't have to.)

Here's what it is like when I go ahead and put in everything that is running through my head at the moment:

Alice was part of that same drifting set of international playboys as James, traveling corners of the world far from the short-list of hotspots the paparazzi hovered vulture-like around; places where they could smash up things and creatures then retreat back into their vast carelessness (and equally vast reserves of wealth hidden within Matryoshka-doll nests of holding companies and numbered Panamanian bank accounts.)

Okay, I cheated; I did look up the quote from The Great Gatsby. But I knew starting the paragraph roughly what it was and why I wanted it.

Inifinite Trojans

I woke up this morning with the thought of just deleting the book from Kindle. And giving up on that particular series.

No, I wouldn't give up on writing. I just don't feel strongly about that book. I can do some quick fixes but I can't deal with spending a lot of time on it, not when the basic foundation is unsatisfying.

So here's the slightly more productive -- but equally dangerous -- thought for this morning.

I never explained The Odyssey. I mean, I just got through adding in a few details for that reader that somehow hadn't remembered the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. And I took out a lot of the "In Critius" cites and replaced them with "Plato also says."

So why assume the reader knows their Homer?

***

But what is the option? Do I really want to explain the whole story? Sure, it would strengthen the connections I'm making both to Penny and her Odyssey from the Rhine valley back to Athens. And to the story of Schliemann "discovering" the historical Troy.

But the trouble with history is, where do you stop? If I have to explain even one episode of The Odyssey, do I have to explain the basics of the book? Do I then have to context it by explaining the Trojan War? Do I have to explain that in turn by talking about Homer and his time?

This is a sort of inevitable problem. You say, "Alea iacta est" and someone says, "What?" So you explain that Caesar said it. "Caesar who?" "Julius Caesar. You know, the first Emperor of Rome."
"Which Rome?" "Classical Rome, not the modern city..."

Obviously there is always more to say. That's not the point I'm making. The point is how to you find that place where the reader thinks they know enough and thus is comfortable continuing on with the story?

"Your father and I fought in the Clone Wars," Ben Kenobi tells young Luke. That's enough, for that moment, for that conversation. Later, the movies had to visit that time (and royally messed it up.)

So where is the equivalent point in talking about Homer? How much needs to be on the page in order for the reader not to stop, furrow their brow, and reach for a dictionary? If the reader doesn't know of The Illiad, how can you communicate to them that it is okay to skip over it, and it either won't matter much or the important bits will get explained later?

I find this particularly odd because Science Fiction and Fantasy absolutely do this all the time. No writer (well, okay, no writer other than Jack Vance) mentions "Fellbeasts" and then immediately explains all of their biology and habits. Instead, the story creates an empty box. And the reader carries around this box labeled "Fellbeasts"; two chapters later, the reader learns they are found in the Mist Forest. Another chapter, and that they were created during the Mage Wars and can not be killed by iron weapons. So the box is getting filled, bit by bit. And now they have another pair of boxes...what was this "Mage War" you were talking about?

I mean, think of the mystery story. We don't know who killed him. We don't really know a lot. And we are told right up front that the dame with the slinky legs who told us the reader that her husband is dead is lying about a lot of things. There might not even be a body at all!

But, no, you do other genres, and suddenly the reader is all "Portkin, Nebraska? What kind of town is it? Is it on the Federal Highway? How many people live there? Is there a Starbucks?"

Why can't they accept that they aren't going to learn everything, and that there absolutely is no practical way to tell them everything right at the first instant they demand it?

***

Maybe it is better not to mention it at all. I have an episode late in the book where my character is trying to single-hand a small sailing boat across the Aegean. She notices some kind of weird disturbance in the water, perhaps a sort of whirlpool, but in steering away from it finds herself getting far too close to some rocks.

That's how I described that bit to my Boston Latin graduated dad at the pub a few weeks back. "Scylla and Charybdis" he said.

So the reader who didn't know, still doesn't know, and more importantly, isn't left with a question. This really is a better way of doing things if you can.

A lot harder when the point of the scene is a visit to the Acropolis. "There was this old building thing in Greece and it was historically important" really, really isn't going to fly.

No more horse armor

The book is in print and now the people I approached for a beta read are getting back to me. Well, if it works for game developers...

So I'm going to do a slightly deeper edit this week and upload revised text. No structural changes. All of that work I did during the actual writing (that is, stuff that should have been in the outline) gave it enough thematic structure and development to squeak by.

Yes, it still has nothing to do with the Indiana Jones "go to an exotic land, explore a lost temple, recover alien/ancient technology" story I wanted to write. And it is far from the quick-and-dirty I hoped to write. Using the real world, and trying to do "better" than the usual pseudo-history romp, is way more work than developing an original fantasy world.

Because unlike the fantasy, you have more of an obligation to get it right. Whether the stock fantasy Dwarves are a racist caricature is a thorny question. An Italian from Padua, though...you want to tread lightly.

The first book is still an origin story and those tend to be weak on conflict. After all, the major conflict is, "Will he put on the costume and become a hero?" Um...yeah? It is hard to make a strong conflict out of reluctance. "Cake...or death!" as Eddie Izard would say.

And the way I plotted it, it is largely a travelogue, and half the stuff she does has no payoff in this book. (Like the first episode of the second season of Relic Hunter; at the end of the episode Sydney gets a grappling hook gun. Which is never used in that episode. It is entirely setup for the rest of the season.)

It is even worse because I'm stealthing it a little. It isn't until the last couple chapters that Penny finally realized..."I'm not a globe-trotting adventurer who can speak seven languages. But since I arrived in Athens I've been to Germany and Italy and Greece, traveled by boat and train, and I've been faking my way through hello and thank you in all the local tongues. So...yeah."

Anyhow. The big thing I'm going to try to do is knock out some of the references. There's far too many places where my protagonist points to something the reader isn't familiar with and describes it by comparing to something else the reader might not be familiar with.

At worst case, those are going to move from pop-culture and game references to historical references. Which is at least in character and more in theme.

The Acropolis lecture; trim a couple of the stories (I trimmed it down twice already but it could be shorter.) The Prologue tomb-crawl; take out more names and replace with descriptions, and in general simplify. She's solving a puzzle. The reader doesn't need to be puzzled with her.

I almost took out the Museum of the Agora several times. It only stayed because it described cisterns and black-figure pottery, and name-dropped Alkibiades. It probably should go.

The Atlantis conversation is so tight I don't see an easy way of cutting into it. Could probably name-drop less about the Minoans, though.

The cistern climb, the bouldering terminology needs to cut WAY back.

And, yes, the Oblivion Horse Armor quote is going away.

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.)

>>>

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.)