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.
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