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Saturday, August 21st, 2004 01:37 pm
in which ego nosedives
I finally finished preliminary edits on Stumble and Fall, via ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cjandre's brutal beta, and here's what I found out, just from counting. This segues with the beta rivkat just sent me of another story.
1.) I believe in combining three perfectly usable sentences into one, miles long one. And when I say miles, I mean, I have a sentence that extends for a very long paragraph. Or several paragraphs of those. What. The. Hell? How does it hurt me to use a period? Is the world running out of periods? Am I afraid if I use too many, someone else has to go without? Why am I afraid of periods? Did they do something to me in a former life that makes me suspicious of them?
2.) Related to that, comma abuse. This is unreal. I have commas in places that commas have never traveled in any respectable sentence structure. I am packing them up and sending them to a comma foster home, where hopefully they can find good writers that won't hurt them like I do.
3.) Adverbs. I don't even know where to start with this one. It's not that I just use them without pity; I turn things into adverbs that were never meant to be adverbs.
4.) The semi-colon and I are some kind of deadly enemies. You'd think I'd expect them to attack me en masse if I use too many. Which trust me, I don't. This relates to comma violence above, as many a self-respecting semi-colon could have been used to ease my abundance of sad little commas.
5.) 468 uses of words that have an ly at the end. That's 6.158 per page. I just checked this with find/replace and a calculator. That's a lot of adverbs. That doens't include the ones that don't have ly at the end.
6.) I have people looking a lot. 197 times, to be exact.
7.) I can't face counting the gerunds.
I need to start from scratch and rewrite, but I'm not sure I can face that right now.
Okay, now that *that's* out of the way.
I want to have one more pair of eyes run over this before I post it. Anyone willing?cjandre made a lot of comments on continuity and timelineliness, and at this stage, I honestly to God can't figure out how to do it, I've read and edited so many times. Would anyone be willing? Please? I'll make you a cookie icon. That's about the best I can do at this point. I'm doing another run-through just on grammar using her notes to figure out how many sentence fragments I can kill without too much messiness, but the story still feels fragmented. I don't think I did enough connection between some scenes, but I've lost anything resembling an editorial mindset.
*hopes* Post here or email, either one. It's at 32,599 words as of right now. jenn at thegateway dot net.
cjandre's brutal beta, and here's what I found out, just from counting. This segues with the beta rivkat just sent me of another story.1.) I believe in combining three perfectly usable sentences into one, miles long one. And when I say miles, I mean, I have a sentence that extends for a very long paragraph. Or several paragraphs of those. What. The. Hell? How does it hurt me to use a period? Is the world running out of periods? Am I afraid if I use too many, someone else has to go without? Why am I afraid of periods? Did they do something to me in a former life that makes me suspicious of them?
2.) Related to that, comma abuse. This is unreal. I have commas in places that commas have never traveled in any respectable sentence structure. I am packing them up and sending them to a comma foster home, where hopefully they can find good writers that won't hurt them like I do.
3.) Adverbs. I don't even know where to start with this one. It's not that I just use them without pity; I turn things into adverbs that were never meant to be adverbs.
4.) The semi-colon and I are some kind of deadly enemies. You'd think I'd expect them to attack me en masse if I use too many. Which trust me, I don't. This relates to comma violence above, as many a self-respecting semi-colon could have been used to ease my abundance of sad little commas.
5.) 468 uses of words that have an ly at the end. That's 6.158 per page. I just checked this with find/replace and a calculator. That's a lot of adverbs. That doens't include the ones that don't have ly at the end.
6.) I have people looking a lot. 197 times, to be exact.
7.) I can't face counting the gerunds.
I need to start from scratch and rewrite, but I'm not sure I can face that right now.
Okay, now that *that's* out of the way.
I want to have one more pair of eyes run over this before I post it. Anyone willing?
cjandre made a lot of comments on continuity and timelineliness, and at this stage, I honestly to God can't figure out how to do it, I've read and edited so many times. Would anyone be willing? Please? I'll make you a cookie icon. That's about the best I can do at this point. I'm doing another run-through just on grammar using her notes to figure out how many sentence fragments I can kill without too much messiness, but the story still feels fragmented. I don't think I did enough connection between some scenes, but I've lost anything resembling an editorial mindset.*hopes* Post here or email, either one. It's at 32,599 words as of right now. jenn at thegateway dot net.
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From:*Hugs*
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From:I am probably gonna take a nap soon, but when I wake up, story reading will commence!
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From:*Hugs* I hope it is worth the wait. Just a little more editorial destruction and it should be fit for posting.
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From:We love you, we do!
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From:It's like I'm running some sort of grudge vendetta against the english language. What on earth did it to do me to make it--*dither* like this?
Dither is my new word of the day. ditherditherdither.
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OMG
From:-Silverkyst
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From:I use that one all the time. After NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org) I was messing around with the auto-summary on Word, seeing what the novel would look like cut down to 500 words. A hell of a lot of those words ended up being 'he looked' or 'she looked'.
Speaking of beta-reading, how soon do you want the bits you sent me back? I was hoping to have it finished by about Wednesday this week, but then I got a job. Hee.
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From:*sighs* I'm trying not to think of that very hard.
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From:I'm not that great with grammer either... but I am pretty good at transitions and making a story flow. If you still need an extra pair of eyes, let me know.
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From:Re: adverbosity and semicolonophobia, Hey, when you're famous, they just call it authorial style. Faulkner had problems with periods too.
-Silverkyst
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