OMFG!
What’s 50,000 x 10?
Half a million.
That’s the number of words that I’ve probably edited so far. And that’s only for a single book!!!
This (supposed) last draft has been a slog and I’ve had to force myself to even contemplate finishing it. But I’m done. The last two pages may have taken an hour a piece (internets u has distracted me) and the accepting of the tract changes alone took exactly 30 minutes. They alone comprised of 6 pages worth of text. Phew, what a marathon. And by that feeling I’m probably not going to do another draft, so I better have done it right by now.
I look over all the previous drafts and I see just how far I’ve come. My first copy of Feet or Fins was just shy of 42,000 words. Draft three only had increased a few thousand words. But draft seven had increased to just over 51,000 words. The screenshots above aren’t as good as from the sixth edit, simply because I was using a different word software – Apache Open Office. But they show up the track changes fine enough.
From there the word count pretty much stayed the same. The only things that I began changing or finalising is where chunks of information was placed, how dialogue was phrased and what small section should be kept or cut. I also had to work on formatting the text to the Smashwords’ format guide.
In the last week or two I have finally gotten around to edit the last 35 pages. Before that I had stopped as I was feeling burnt out from it. But now it is over.
That feels when you finish your first book 🙂
Now I’m going to send off this draft to some people so they can go over it 🙂
Stephanie Haggarty 