I was going to post part of this yesterday, but I didn’t. Stupid Bush.
Anyway, turns out that I was a bit inaccurate in my previous post, as the PDF text-to-speech worked just fine on my friend’s computer at distinguishing between wind (as in “wind-up”) and wind (as in “the wind blows”). The only difference is that he didn’t have Office 2007 (and may have in fact been on XP since the default voice was Microsoft Mike while on Vista it’s Microsoft Mary).
Yet more proof that Vista is a downgrade from XP. Not that more proof was needed.
Anyway, I also have to give a shout out to that same friend, Travis. I’ve finished the latest edit on The 13th Prime and was starting to go through it chapter by chapter (although it doesn’t have real “chapters”…but that’s another story). Since Travis is good at editing and giving his opinion, I sent him the first chapter after I was about 95% confident in it.
Showing he’s a true friend, Travis said: “I can tell this is one of your older works.” Why? “Because you’re much better now.”
Which actually confirmed my suspicious. I had figured that I was 95% done and that it would only take one more draft to iron out a few remaining rough patches, but as I had begun work on the second chapter revisions I had gotten a bit bogged down and had begun to think that it might be a little less than 95% ready. But I was still in that delusional area where I thought I was close enough.
But Travis’s critique was spot on. And more than that, I knew that I was a better writer than my current version of The 13th Prime has me.
Earlier this year, I wrote a short story entitled What Time Can’t Heal. I haven’t posted it anywhere because I entered it into a short story contest which, if I win, will publish it and I don’t want to have the story already archived in Google’s cache before it can get published. But if you were to ask me what my best work was to date, I would say it’s that short story.
After I spoke with Travis this morning, I got to my lunch break and decided to rework the first chapter again. It’s 7 pages long (in default Word format, not book format), and I wasn’t able to get the entire chapter revised on my lunch break. However, as I edited it, I consciously told myself: I’m writing What Time Can’t Heal again. And with that short story in mind—not the plot, not the structure, but rather what I felt internally as I wrote it—I finished up three pages.
And it was so much better than the draft I had given to Travis yesterday.
I’m not saying it’s perfect yet. Because it’s not. I’ll need to do at least two more revisions after I’m done with this one before I’ll get that confident in it (because I’m the kind of person who edits until I get to the point where I think the best I have is a neutral edit; that is, I could change words around but it won’t improve the story. That’s when I’m done editing…and sometimes I think I’m there before I really am too, but again, that’s a different story.)
In any case, this means that the quick final edit I envisioned is now a bit more intricate than originally thought. But the end product ought to blow the current version away without even trying.
So thanks Travis :-)
Oh, and I still blame Bush.
