AQATWA: It's been a long, long road
I think Ozarkers broke my spellchecker.
The last stage before the manuscript is "final" is doing a final spellcheck.
"Wait, don't you spellcheck it as you're going?" you ask. "Don't your betas check your spelling?"
Yes, and everyone knows you can't rely on a spellchecker to catch all your mistakes. But it does catch (most) typos, and running the entire draft through a spellchecker in one pass catches many inconsistencies that aren't apparent when you are reading a chapter at a time. Especially when you're dealing with things like Potterwords, that sometimes are capitalized and sometimes aren't. Names spelled inconsistently (like "Maximilian" spelled with two "l"s). The dreaded extra space. (Okay, no one dreads that. It's just annoying.)
The problem, however, is when you have large chunks of the book filled with dialog that no spellchecker recognizes as English. Man, I had to click "Ignore" a lot.
Why am I sharing the fascinating details of final draft preparation with you? Because the final draft is done.
Alexandra Quick and the World Away is done.
59 chapters, 288,900 words.
(This word count will change a little bit, because even though I say the draft is final, I still do one final read-through of each chapter before I post it, and frequently tweak a few things here and there.)
I will begin posting in August. My plan right now is to post twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. I'll be posting concurrently to fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own.
It's been a long, long road.
The last stage before the manuscript is "final" is doing a final spellcheck.
"Wait, don't you spellcheck it as you're going?" you ask. "Don't your betas check your spelling?"
Yes, and everyone knows you can't rely on a spellchecker to catch all your mistakes. But it does catch (most) typos, and running the entire draft through a spellchecker in one pass catches many inconsistencies that aren't apparent when you are reading a chapter at a time. Especially when you're dealing with things like Potterwords, that sometimes are capitalized and sometimes aren't. Names spelled inconsistently (like "Maximilian" spelled with two "l"s). The dreaded extra space. (Okay, no one dreads that. It's just annoying.)
The problem, however, is when you have large chunks of the book filled with dialog that no spellchecker recognizes as English. Man, I had to click "Ignore" a lot.
Why am I sharing the fascinating details of final draft preparation with you? Because the final draft is done.
Alexandra Quick and the World Away is done.
59 chapters, 288,900 words.
(This word count will change a little bit, because even though I say the draft is final, I still do one final read-through of each chapter before I post it, and frequently tweak a few things here and there.)
I will begin posting in August. My plan right now is to post twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. I'll be posting concurrently to fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own.
It's been a long, long road.