Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Let the slog of revision begin!

I started revising my latest GURPS Dungeon Fantasy book tonight.

It's a slow slog of going through comments, finding errors, correcting them, and then re-checking them. It's finding weird formatting errors that crept into Word's Styles because I tapped the keys and typed something with a Japanese keyboard setup (or on my Japanese PC). It's a lot of changing , to ; and ; to , or deleting them both or noticing that I made one bold and italic but the end comma only bold. Stuff like that.

It's kind of a pain.

It makes a better book on the other end, but while you'll hear crud about "you have to kill your babies" and authors fighting editors over a word . . . you don't hear so much about how it's a slog through corrections.

One thing I like about SJG is that they make authors do those corrections. I get a lot of little stuff wrong - but less of them wrong than before. I'm learning to do more of it right the first time.

There is great joy in writing. But writing to spec is tough and correcting to spec is part of the deal.

That's what I'm up to, if my blog seems a little on the brief side for a few days. I'm trying to knock this stuff out, finish my update of The Lost City for game on Sunday, and roll into next week with this off of my plate.

11 comments:

  1. If you need an extra set of eyes for formatting, I seem to be a pretty popular choice with some of the other authors. And I'm always happy to help. *says the guy who sleeps with the SJ Games Style Guide*

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    1. Thanks. If I need help I'll let you know.

      Mostly it's just a question of going through Sean's meticulous notes equally meticulously! Not hard, so much as I don't want to do it anymore after a given 30 minutes of doing it. :)

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    2. Yeah, I was a bit taken aback when he sent comments on my own DF book, but very thankful because he EXPLAINED what I did wrong in such a way that I added it to my mental checklist of things to look for before submission. Regardless, good luck. Let me know if you need playtesting too. :-)

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    3. I appreciate the style, though. And copy it. People who've gotten my comments on writing will have an idea of the style.

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  2. I have a first draft due in a few days.

    It's long.

    That's going to be a lot of revisions.

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  3. My editorial experience with SJGames has been remorselessly positive - mostly with Steven for Pyramid, but PK edited Will to Live (and I gather the new one is with Nikki, but I haven't had the comments yet). They've always been very good about explaining why they were requesting a change, and generally I've had a choice between "yes" and "in that case it might work even better if I do this". I've never felt that a change request was unjustified.

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    1. It's harsh but good.

      And yeah, I generally accept all of the changes. Sometimes it's clear that what I'm thinking didn't come across well, though, and I reject the change but go fix things so my actual intent was clear!

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  4. It's almost worth copying the text, pasting it into Notepad, then pasting it back into a new Word document and formatting it when you do your final run-through before sending it. I've done that before, especially for online markets, because the WYSIWYG blog apps freak out over Word's crazy embedded formatting.

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    1. I did that when I was co-writing with someone who used a non-Word word processor. But for my own documents, it would turn 10-20 minutes of hunting down stray weirdness into hours of re-formatting the document.

      There is a reason I write game documents for our game in SJG WYSIWIG format - it's both practice and cut-and-pasteable if I use the text in an article or PDF.

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  5. Why wouldn't you make the author make those changes? Beneath the artistry of it? I guess if the author is the one with the power it would make more sense to pay someone else less to do it?

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