Results of Ruminations

I just finished red lining up through Chapter 10 today. I've put in a bit of effort on the revision process, and--as I predicted--it has been extremely difficult. The first chapter I revised was last Saturday, when the fam and my in-laws and I all sat around the cabin and played Ticket to Ride on various iDevices via Bluetooth. While I waited for my turn, I would poke around the first chapter--which I've revised a couple of times in the past, but figured I ought to give it a real close look this time around--and then assign trains and draw cards. I lost both games. Anyway, I was kind of discouraged about that. It took me the better part of an hour to go through one measly chapter. I didn't really expect to do the revisions quickly, but I did expect it to be less irritating. I threw a picture of a shirt one of my group members made for me back around Christmas time. It has a Pac-Man kind of guy saying, "Revisions make me sad." That statement is still true. I ...

This is a reading summary. After my day-long blitz to finish the book, I thought about letting it cool, giving me some space between the drafting process and the revision process. That 'space' turned out to be about half a week. Using the brilliant yWriter5 as my way around irritating compilation issues, I imported my book into Word, changed the double dashes into em-dashes, deleted some superfluous asterisks, tweaked the formatting just a touch, paginated the thing, and then saved it to my USB drive. Despite some mild hiccups (or hiccoughs, if you will), I managed to get it printed out at a nearby UPS Store that was doing a promo of $.02 a page. That's a third the cost of the next cheapest place. So--splurging--I went ahead and purchased two  copies of the book--for less than the price of one elsewhere. Downside was that the printing screwed up certain letters: capitals P, Z, and K were weird, everything in italics looked screwy, and the lowercase k, g, and z were also...