Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Lifehack progress continued. Chapter 16

Still not far from past 25% done, done some other random formatting housekeeping got done.

The removal of the infodumps has been a pretty positive experience. I now look at the infodumps as laziness.

I found another incredibly stupid chapter-separation error. Half way through a chapter, there's a line that just declares
chapter #: blah blah.
And then continues on with the story.

No page break, no graphical bar separator, no nuthin. Two chapters had been combined into one at some point because they were very short, and the text declaring the next chapter was just never removed. I'm really starting to wonder how four sets of eyes could have missed some of these errors. Yeep. I'm so glad I'm doing a revision.


My inability to justify finding a few hundred dollars for a pro edit has led me to collect a handful of ideas for cheap/free editing when I'm done with the revision.
  • Have a copy printed, and pass it around to friends with a highlighter. (a similar method didn't work so well with the original version...)
  • The free e-book/contest in the last post
  • Find an SFU lit student who will do it cheap
  • Hire a pro for a few hundred
Did I miss anything? Spending on it doesn't seem to make sense when I don't have the time, experience, or additional funding to make a really market the result. (le sigh..)

1 comment:

Becka said...

You might find a semi-pro who'll do it for less than a few hundred on the services forum.

For example I have a friend I'm intending to use who's an English Graduate who charges $5 per 10k words for basic grammar, punctuation and spelling checking and $7.50 per 10k words if you want him to check stuff like characterisation and timeline. So for 100k novel he'd charge between $50 and $75 depending on what you wanted. He also does a free 1000 word test edit so ou can check his standard of work. Here's his thread.

http://www.lulu.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=64558

As you can see he's out of town at the moment but he shuld be back by the time you need a proofreader. (No, he's not paying me for this)

Anyway HA is just one example. I'm sure there are other reasonably priced proofreaders on he forums.

Becky