Done -- sort of.
3,500 words, and I'm calling it a day.
The last 1,000 words were written in the middle of a head-throbbing, nausea-inducing migraine, and while I'm not thrilled with it -- I feel I could've expanded on a few things -- it's good enough.
After all, I still have to edit the damn thing.
There are several different types of editing, all of them equally important, and I'm sure, somewhere, there's a proper order to how you approach it, and the way I do it is totally wrong. But that's OK. There's no wrong way to write, and there's no right way to edit.
Wait. Is it, there's no right way to write, and no wrong way to edit?
There's copyediting, which, among other things checks for proper physical structure of a sentence including capitalization, punctuation, and style. There are style guides for this all over the place -- the Chicago handbook or the MLA handbook are two examples. Which one do I use? Neither, because I have had long and compelling arguments with my high school creative writing teacher (back in the day) that rules were made to be broken, because otherwise, how is someone being creative in the first place? Note that my use of "long and compelling arguments" in the previous sentence is the equivalent of "I lost every argument despite being a loudmouth, but got points for trying". Still, it's a good thing to remember that if in one chapter I refer to a character as Lancelot, I can't abruptly change it later to use Lance instead because I'm too lazy to keep typing L-a-n-c-e-l-o-t. I might confuse people.
There's line editing, which is a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence review to check for spelling mistakes and correct grammar and word usage. Interesting fact: When you hit a certain word count in Microsoft Word, it stops automatically checking for spelling. Apparently there are "too many" mistakes to keep checking. That's FINE. "I don't need it anyway", she says, pouting and stomping a foot. It's not like Word will catch homonyms, or notice that I've used the word "glare" ten times in a 100 word paragraph. It definitely doesn't spot the hilarious typos (usually caused by writing while exhausted, or when the monkeys in the basement get into the liquor cabinet), like when I'm typing "things" and it comes out "thongs" (although in that particular scene it might've worked anyway). And what good is it when it won't catch illegal acts of distracted writing when I lost track and forgot who was banging who? (the answer: Arthur is not shagging Arthur. No. That's just. Not.)
There's substantive editing, where "substantive" is a fancy word for I had to Google it to find out what it was really called, and where the focus is looking at the whole document and checking for continuity error, plot, and Holy crap, I was totally smoking something when I wrote that. Out of habit, I check for other things too. It's not just continuity and plot, it's context and plausibility and come on, really? Is this even possible in this universe I'm writing in?. For example, if someone shot Bayard in the first 1,000 words for no other reason beyond he's a complete wanker (well, he is!), he can't miraculously show up 6,000 words later without a mark on him even though someone (*cough*Gwaine*cough*) might have shot him between the eyes with an explosive bullet (continuity error). And, no, absolutely not, Merlin cannot suddenly develop the ability to shoot lasers out of his eyes, and I don't care how cool that is (plausibility!fail), I really need to come up with a better way to resolve the situation.
For the record, in the above examples, there were no spoilers. Just saying.
Fact checking -- also an important aspect of editing -- does something awful cool, if a little bit complicated. It checks facts. Yeah, that's awesome, isn't it? No, really. I am Bad (capital B) at fact checking because I tend to fact check as I write. This is why I studied Google Fu. Do they call potato chips "potato chips" in Britain? (No. They're called "crisps".) Do they have Land Rovers in Paris? (Yes. I found someone selling theirs in arrondissement 19. However, a recent news article mentioned some sort of law passing to make it illegal to drive big SUVs in Paris.) How fast is a tennis serve? (Pretty darned fast, actually). Do they even care about hockey in Britain? (Error: does not compute, search stalled at pretty pictures of footie players). Fact checking as I write only works if I have access to a reference text, which I don't always have on hand. And the only time I check facts once I'm done is if there's something glaring, like a highlighted-bright-yellow note to self in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS asking, [WHAT WAS THE NAME OF THAT CLUB AGAIN].
Except for the fact checking, once I let my inner editor loose, the inner editor cackles with glee and goes at it with a hacksaw. The text turns into a bloody mess that is usually almost always fixed on the go, because I hate going through the text more than once, even if it means I'll have to go back at some point when someone spots an embarrassing typo. I'm OK with fixing typos later. What gets posted on AO3 is usually my first and only editing pass, although now, I have a lovely pair of betas who are keeping eyes-out on the typos, continuity and fact-checking fronts.
It being close to the holidays, and me not wanting to delay posting Part 8 (any more than I already have by, you know, writing the thing), I'll be posting a partially beta-'ed version where, hopefully, the biggest problem will be a bunch of typos that I'll have missed. I hope you'll forgive me for that.
And, oh, yes, for metrics sake -- the pre-edited version of Part 8 stands a 73.7K (this, for some reason, also includes the HTML coding). There will be some cutting and a lot of adding, so the final number with change.