Writing Report #5: Big Changes & Behind Schedule

 This writing report is for Monday (22/08/2016), Tuesday (23/08/2016) and Wednesday (24/08/2016).

When I started the week with the usual editing of two chapters on Monday, I wasn't expecting anything special for the rest of the week. Until Tuesday, when I had an epiphany. I felt like a real writer once more, after inevitably feeling jaded by the amount of changes I had to make during editing even after so many drafts.

Funny how more changes in the editing process saved me from turning into a jade stone. Basically, I made a saving change to the novel's title, which is covered in my previous post, and I have executed successfully, I believe, the complete removal of a chapter I deemed superfluous.

My manuscript is now 3,750 words shorter, which means the resulting novel, if in print and standard-sized, will be 15 pages shorter. It will cost $5 less to get it professionally edited. But like a man on a weight-loss regime (oddly resembling me... Yeah, I'm a little overweight), it went ahead and gained perhaps 250 to 300 more words in the  next chapter.

But it's all a matter of course. The contents of the deleted chapter can't be entirely committed to the void. I summarised it and placed it in the subsequent chapter. In the end, it was still necessary for one of the character's development, however minor the role is.

This happened on Tuesday and Wednesday. The downside for such a massive action is that I'm now 2 chapters behind schedule. The one chapter head start I gave myself was absorbed yesterday.

I've also learnt that Nimble Writer is no longer the best word processor for me anymore. For all its nifty features and intuitive UI, it had a major flaw that exacerbated an already tedious task.

The deletion of a chapter meant renumbering all subsequent chapters. All 45 or so of them. I had to right click, click on rename and renumber the chapters one at a time. But that's not all, folks! Sometimes, the button refuses to work! I had to repeat the process multiple times, open and close parts of the UI to get to work - A lot of the times! In the end, I spent over an hour doing this when it should have taken like 10 minutes.

An hour could have been one or two chapters edited. I wouldn't have been behind schedule if it weren't for this.

For what it's worth. Nimble Writer has served me well up to this point. The last time I checked on steam, I had logged 350 hours on the word processor. By now it should be close to 400. I may continue to use it for some time longer, but I will be exploring other options now.