Through Stranger Eyes has reached the point in the revision/editing process where only minor details remain, as you can see from the sample image below.

If you thought to yourselves that it’s way too cluttered for me to be calling these as “minor details,” you should have seen it after I finished drafting it. So what’s minor details? By minor details, I mean finalising character names (the green bits you see scattered all over the place) and/or some names for places, and of course work on continuity (the comment bubbles at the left side). Some of those are question I ask myself about the world or what my main character sees or has seen so far.

What? Don’t tell me you don’t debate with yourselves about these things. Little things, like, “should he see X detail now or five pages later when the character enters Y place?” or “should she have this dialogue line here, or should I have used it in the previous chapter?” I’m sure you do it too. You are, right? I’m not the only one who does that, yes?

*crickets*

Anyway, once that’s done, I’m thinking of editing in a slightly different way than what I did for The Darkening. This time, I’ll print it out first (instead of doing it at the very end), take my trusty red pen, probably delete or change somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the whole thing, then transfer the edits to the digital copy. Once that’s done, I’ll look for those sneaky filter words with my trusty macros, and use my favourite online tool for sentence lengths.

For sentence lengths (but not just that) I’m using Slick Write and I’m loving the flow graph they provide (found at the left sidebar, after you paste part of your manuscript and press the Check button), particularly the Sentence Length Flow. If the graph isn’t a perfect (or as near to a perfect to my satisfaction) wavy pattern (yeah, fine, sinusoidal graph, for you with a mathematics/physics background) then it’s time to tweak the problematic sentences. Once that’s done, it’s off to betas, around late spring by my estimates. Hopefully.