Gahhhh this is tedious.

See, last week I printed out my novel Dead Reign. Since then, I've read it. Basically, I was trying to get a sense of the book as a whole again, how the pieces fit together, how different elements balance, whether I resolved everything I set up (at least, the bits I didn't intentionally leave dangling because they'll come up in book 4), etc. I'd been doing these little targeted revisions, working on specific scenes, and as a result, I felt I'd lost my sense of the gestalt. So reading the book again was a good thing. I made lots of additions, caught lots of continuity errors, tried to clear up rules and motivations and so forth. Necessary things. But, of course, because I was reading the book with a pen in my hand, I couldn't resist line editing. The novel was very rough in its first draft, so there were lots of line edits. On some pages, only a few of the original words remain, like small volcanic islands poking up above the surface of a sea of red ink. (Well, actually, black ink. I'm color blind, and can't generally tell the difference between red ink and black ink, unless there's a large puddle of the stuff leaking on my desk or something. Discerning the difference from little thin lines of scribbling, not so much. So I just use black. But red is traditional.)

I finished my read through this morning. (Overall, I think the book's good! Much better than the version my long-suffering first readers experienced.) So now I have to actually go through and make all those scrawled changes. And it's tedious. I spent about three hours doing it today, and only made it through 87 pages (of 303). Not even a third of the way done! If I continue at this pace, it'll take me nine hours total to make all the changes. It's not that I type slowly. It's that there are a lot of changes.

And after this, I need to read it again next week, because it will need another line edit, at the very least -- I don't trust myself to line edit a scene I wrote two days ago. The words are too fresh, and I'm too in love with my own cleverness to realize how annoying it is. I think I'm done with the heavy lifting parts of revision, though. I hope. I think it works a lot better now. Wish me luck.

My day off was pretty uneventful. Much of it was spent typing corrections, and doing my freelance work. I took a long walk to try out my new shoes, fancy Tevas (these, in black), and they're awesome, ludicrously adjustable and very comfy. (My old Tevas finally died, pretty much utterly, the sole simply splitting in two. Let's hear it for Zappos.com and their free overnight delivery.) While I was out I ate gelato and read the beginning of Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys, and I suspect I'll stay up late tonight reading it some more.

For dinner I cooked wrapped tilapia and coconut rice again, experimenting further with sauce and rice variations... Heather liked the sauce better with the extra garlic and green onion, but thought there was too much cinnamon in the rice. I continue to perfect my technique...