Changes by Chapter 04/02/2014

04/02/2014

2042 words written, and I'm well into the last chapter.

It's been very busy at work and every free moment was spent writing, so I don't have much to say, but I will say a little about how things change when you reach the end of the story. I keep up on my progress using Microsoft excel, and have a spreadsheet for each of my ongoing projects. One tab is a chapter-by-chapter overly with chapter names and the status of the chapter (rough draft, first edit, etc.), and another tab has a counter for how many words I write and how many are left before I hit my goal point for that book. Other tabs include characters, places, timelines, and so forth. It helps me keep the story straight. By far, though, the most important one is the first tab, the chapter tab.

Here, I have all of my chapters, named and marked in green for finished, yellow for in progress, or red for no progress in columns for rough draft, first edit, second edit, and beta edit. Currently, book 1 is in beta edit on chapter 7. But the most important is the last column, marked "changes to make by chapter." There, I mark things that I changed in my head as I wrote and that I need to go back and change. The most recent example is how I modified the name of a technology in my story, and needed to place a reminder in each of the chapters that I remembered where I had used that tech. It makes the first edit much cleaner, and I can make sure that I'm being consistent with my concepts and ideas throughout the work.

Bishop