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November '03
The countdown can now begin. In one year, the Dark Tower series will be out there for everyone to read and my book, The Road to the Dark Tower, will be sitting on the shelves beside it!
I worked hard on revisions this weekend, going through the text and smoothing out things that got ruffled up when I did my spot-changes based on my editor's feedback. I'm also finding some more of the redundancies that he noted as I work my way through it from the beginning to end. It's intensive work, I find. I thought I'd get more done than I did, but I did manage to cover the first 100 pages of the manuscript, about a quarter of the book. I'm being a little more ruthless this time, chopping some things that I'm finding trite or that were covered elsewhere in the text. I'm also paring back the footnotes a bit by moving the comments into the text where possible.
By the end of next weekend, I plan to be done this pass and ready to print it out for a final hardcopy sweep through the book. My trip to NY for the National Book Awards banquet in the middle of the month is my gift to myself for getting the job done!
Author: CrinVA
A well deserved gift I am sure - Please post about your trip when you get back!
Author: Bev Vincent
I surely will. I just talked to a guy from the National Book Foundation -- this is going to be a great event. I'm so glad my wife twisted my arm and convinced me to go!
Author: Bev Vincent
Ten more days -- that's what I've set myself to finish this round of edits. My plan is to wrap it up on the 15th and send it to arrive in New York on Monday the 17th. That'll give me a couple of days to unwind before I go to the award banquet. But the days between now and then...
Up at 5, edit until 7, get ready for work, work from 7:30 to 5:00, go home and edit until 9:30 or until I can't see straight any more! I got through something like 30 pages yesterday and am into the Wolves of the Calla section so I think my 10 day deadline is manageable.
What really encourages me is this: I don't hate the book! I've been working at it this round for about a month and I'm liking it more and more all the time, especially with this new vision of it as something with a flowing narrative rather than individual chapters. I'm actually looking forward to sitting down with it in hardcopy next week and going through it like a book, albeit one I'll be marking up with my much-feared red pen!
Author: eta6
I know what you mean, Bev. I write short stories every now and then when the mood strikes me, and does it have to strike me. I love writing, but I have to be ready to write to do it. But I love revising, going through, chopping it up, moving things around. I think I like that aspect the best because that is when the story, or the writing in general, really starts to come together.
Author: Bev Vincent
I keep a little scrap of paper on my desk where I note what page I'm on when I end for the day so I don't have to go searching through the document to find my place. Being somewhat compulsive about numbers, I usually take note, too, of how many pages I've covered and then do the math to see how I'm doing on schedule.
I was sort of disappointed with my progress yesterday morning because I noticed that the day before I'd covered something like 30 pages but I only managed about eight in my morning session. Then I realized last night that the endnotes don't get counted into the tally until I move on to the next chapter. So, by the end of my session last night I was right on the mark with another 30 pages. I finished the Wolves chapter yesterday and got into Song of Susannah, which I finished this morning. I'm halfway through the book and should finish this pass on Sunday. When I do, I'll immediately take it off to the printer so I'll be ready on Monday morning to do my last read-through.
Did I mention I'm compulsive about numbers? At the end of every session I back up the file to floppy disk using the Windows Briefcase feature. One thing I always note is the size of the file. The first version I submitted was under 1 MB but I've added the text of Browning's poem as an appendix so the file swelled a little. I don't understand, though, how I can delete text and the file gets bigger! This morning I considered it a small victory when the file decreased from 1.21 MB to 1.19, the first decrease in ages in spite of the fact that almost everything I'm doing now is tightening the text and removing redundancy! Well, that's not exactly true -- I keep finding new little things to add in here and there, too, but I think on average at the end of a given session the text is a little bit shorter than when I started.
Did I mention I'm compulsive about numbers?
Author: eta6
I think word processors track changes to the text sometimes. Not sure. I could be way off, but that seems like a likely answer. Oh well, just guessing, lol.
I worked hard on revisions this weekend, going through the text and smoothing out things that got ruffled up when I did my spot-changes based on my editor's feedback. I'm also finding some more of the redundancies that he noted as I work my way through it from the beginning to end. It's intensive work, I find. I thought I'd get more done than I did, but I did manage to cover the first 100 pages of the manuscript, about a quarter of the book. I'm being a little more ruthless this time, chopping some things that I'm finding trite or that were covered elsewhere in the text. I'm also paring back the footnotes a bit by moving the comments into the text where possible.
By the end of next weekend, I plan to be done this pass and ready to print it out for a final hardcopy sweep through the book. My trip to NY for the National Book Awards banquet in the middle of the month is my gift to myself for getting the job done!
Author: CrinVA
A well deserved gift I am sure - Please post about your trip when you get back!
Author: Bev Vincent
I surely will. I just talked to a guy from the National Book Foundation -- this is going to be a great event. I'm so glad my wife twisted my arm and convinced me to go!
Author: Bev Vincent
Ten more days -- that's what I've set myself to finish this round of edits. My plan is to wrap it up on the 15th and send it to arrive in New York on Monday the 17th. That'll give me a couple of days to unwind before I go to the award banquet. But the days between now and then...
Up at 5, edit until 7, get ready for work, work from 7:30 to 5:00, go home and edit until 9:30 or until I can't see straight any more! I got through something like 30 pages yesterday and am into the Wolves of the Calla section so I think my 10 day deadline is manageable.
What really encourages me is this: I don't hate the book! I've been working at it this round for about a month and I'm liking it more and more all the time, especially with this new vision of it as something with a flowing narrative rather than individual chapters. I'm actually looking forward to sitting down with it in hardcopy next week and going through it like a book, albeit one I'll be marking up with my much-feared red pen!
Author: eta6
I know what you mean, Bev. I write short stories every now and then when the mood strikes me, and does it have to strike me. I love writing, but I have to be ready to write to do it. But I love revising, going through, chopping it up, moving things around. I think I like that aspect the best because that is when the story, or the writing in general, really starts to come together.
Author: Bev Vincent
I keep a little scrap of paper on my desk where I note what page I'm on when I end for the day so I don't have to go searching through the document to find my place. Being somewhat compulsive about numbers, I usually take note, too, of how many pages I've covered and then do the math to see how I'm doing on schedule.
I was sort of disappointed with my progress yesterday morning because I noticed that the day before I'd covered something like 30 pages but I only managed about eight in my morning session. Then I realized last night that the endnotes don't get counted into the tally until I move on to the next chapter. So, by the end of my session last night I was right on the mark with another 30 pages. I finished the Wolves chapter yesterday and got into Song of Susannah, which I finished this morning. I'm halfway through the book and should finish this pass on Sunday. When I do, I'll immediately take it off to the printer so I'll be ready on Monday morning to do my last read-through.
Did I mention I'm compulsive about numbers? At the end of every session I back up the file to floppy disk using the Windows Briefcase feature. One thing I always note is the size of the file. The first version I submitted was under 1 MB but I've added the text of Browning's poem as an appendix so the file swelled a little. I don't understand, though, how I can delete text and the file gets bigger! This morning I considered it a small victory when the file decreased from 1.21 MB to 1.19, the first decrease in ages in spite of the fact that almost everything I'm doing now is tightening the text and removing redundancy! Well, that's not exactly true -- I keep finding new little things to add in here and there, too, but I think on average at the end of a given session the text is a little bit shorter than when I started.
Did I mention I'm compulsive about numbers?
Author: eta6
I think word processors track changes to the text sometimes. Not sure. I could be way off, but that seems like a likely answer. Oh well, just guessing, lol.
Comments
Nineteen!
Author: Bev Vincent
LOL, Bob! Hadn't noticed that. Yes, eta, I think Word has this funky way of saving incremental changes that makes the file bigger than it might be otherwise. I am tempted to save the whole thing in RTF and create a new Word document out of it to clear all that garbage, but I think I'll wait until I'm done this round of revisions unless the file gets too big to back up on floppy.
Author: Vodka Riots
Hey, I'm no author or computer guy (as a matter of fact I'm a musician w/ a degree in graphic design - read: barely employable - so my comments are always suspect), but rather than check the file size daily shouldn't you check the word count? Not to make your numbers obsession any worse, but I would think that that would temper your expanding vs contracting editing question better than file size. But hey - I play drums! What the heck do I know?!
VR
Author: Bev Vincent
Oh, have no fear, I notice both the word and page counts as obsessively. That's what vexes me -- fewer words and pages but a bigger file!
Author: Bev Vincent
I did it! At 8:15 last night I finished a marathon weekend-long editing session and got to the point where I was ready to print out my manuscript for one last pass with the hardcopy. Boy, was it ever intense. It's probably the hardest I've ever worked at part of the process of writing. When I started on Saturday morning, I wasn't sure I'd make it all the way to the end, as I had about half the book left to cover, but things just went swimmingly well. Over the course of the past week I've changed a lot, added a little, took out a little, rearranged a lot and, I think, improved the book substantially. I think I've tightened up the writing considerably and organized it better.
The last thing I did before going to the printer was run it through the spell-checker. The manuscript has gotten so complex and there are so many non-standard words in it that Word has given up on spell-checking automatically as I type, so it took me about an hour to go through the entire thing manually.
The document size kept creeping up all weekend long until it was getting desperately close to not fitting on a floppy disk. 1.32 MB at it's largest. However, miracle of miracles, when I saved it after running the spell checker, it suddenly shrank down to 1.03 MB. I have no idea what I did. For a minute, before I committed to backing it up to floppy, I was worried that the file had become corrupted, but it still had the same number of pages (395) and words when I reopened it.
So now I have a fresh, clean copy of The Road to the Dark Tower sitting on my desk, and a brand new red pen at the ready to mark it all up. I have to spend a little time with two chapters as it seemed to me that I wandered perilously close to talking at length about the same subject in both of them. There are two major literary concepts that I deal with and they are distinct but at times I seem to be wandering from one into the other and vice versa, so I need to scrutinize each paragraph in these chapters to make sure they are keeping on track. Other than that, I think I'm good to go.
The last thing I wrote last night was the acknowledgements pages, which I hadn't prepared for my first submission. Six more days, and it's back to New York!
Author: eta6
Congrats Bev. Glad to hear you are getting ever closer to the end. Honestly, visiting this message board has made me more excited to read your book with the passing of each day. Good luck with the red marker.
Author: keeproductions
I concur with Eta6, Bev-
Not only do I expect to thoroughly enjoy the book from the topic level, but from visiting this message board I will be able to enjoy it on a whole different level knowing the effort that went into it from someone I “know.”
I know you've written this out of your own passion, but thanks for your efforts so far to make sure it gets to the rest of us!
Keith
Author: Bev Vincent
Thanks, guys. I think I've put more work into this than I did my Ph. D. thesis! But that was fifteen years ago, so I've probably forgotten what that time was like.
I do some editing in my day job, too, and I have one coworker who gets upset when I start wielding the red pen so now I do all her stuff in green!
And, lo, the red ink did flow.
I got through 100 pages between my session last night after I got home from work and the one I had this morning between 5:30 and 7:00 a.m. I thought I'd get more done last night than I did, but my brain sorta went numb on me about 9:30 so I called it quits. Still, good progress and it puts me 1/4 of the way through and on track to finish by Thursday so I can enter changes on Friday and take one last pass at it before I print it out and send it in on Saturday.
It's an iterative process. Big changes, medium changes, small changes, smaller changes each pass, but a process that never reaches zero. I'd always change something anytime I went over it again so at some point you just say, “That's enough!”
Author: Bev Vincent
Plowing on through, pouring out more red ink. I edited another hundred-plus pages between last night and this morning and I'm not at page 220 out of 395. Mostly I'm fixing typos and those irritating missing words that I remove by mistake when I'm editing. In some places I'm striking out sentences or moving the order of paragraphs, but those changes are relatively few. Every now and then I'll get a new idea and toss it in the margins for when I implement these changes in the e-copy to see if they still seem important to me.
I've been watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in small increments over the past week, not having a 2-1/2 hour block to sit down and watch the whole thing. I can't believe that I've never seen a single bit of this film before in my life. I won't go so far as to say it's a good movie, but it is certainly interesting. Eli Wallach's Tuco is the standout character, moreso than Clint Eastwood. The scene where he encounters his brother and the hospice and his bravado with Blondie afterward is really quite good. The part where he tracks Eastwood across the desert and then forces him to march without water, clearly inspirations for The Gunslinger. I've still got about 40 minutes left to go. Tuco and Blondie have just gotten caught -- again -- while on the way to the graveyard looking for buried gold.
Author: r1Pped
YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN THAT MOVIE!?!?!?!
Now THATS a classic!
try it when you can get to watch it in semi dark and a full 2-1/2 hour timeslot.
Author: Bev Vincent
Not only have I never seen it, I've never seen any bit of it before. You know how there's all these movies that you feel like you've seen because you've caught snippets of 'em here and there over the years? Not a single scene about this film is familiar to me. Eli Wallach is great -- his character is reminiscent of the part he does in The Magnificent Seven. And boy does he take a beating!
Author: Bev Vincent
I'm a day ahead of schedule. This morning I finished my red-ink edits after a long and productive session last night. Tonight I'm going to see how far I can get toward implementing those changes into the file. From that point on, it's just tweaking until I drive myself insane!
I found a few factual screw-ups, a couple of typos, some paragraphs that I want to move around, some sentences and endnotes that I've decided to delete, but I think it's in pretty good shape. Hope my editor shares that belief!
Author: Rache4173
Okay Bev... what's your secret? Is it caffeine? Sugar, maybe? How in the world do you work such long hours and still keep your wits about you? ~0
Author: CRinVA
And a regular job to boot - right ~0
Author: Bev Vincent
Wits? Oh, I gave those up a long time ago!
Caffeine -- I don't drink coffee at all, but I drink probably four or five cups of tea during the day. None at all after about 4 p.m.
Sugar -- My favorite breakfast cereals are the old sugary ones from childhood. Captain Crunch, Alphabits, things like that. Old habits die hard! But right now I'm on a brief weight reduction kick so I've cut junk food out of my diet for the last two weeks. I had crept over 180 when I'm usually most comfortable in the 170-5 range. I'm almost there! Gotta fit into that tux for the National Book Awards.
How do I do it? Sheer determination! I set a deadline and then do everything it takes to meet it.
Sunday, I plan to sleep for two days! Just kidding -- then it's on to the other writing projects that are piling up on my to-do list. Like a Cemetery Dance column due on the 26th, to name just one.
Sometimes it catches up to me, but mostly around 9 p.m. when I start losing focus on what I'm reading. I wake up in the morning raring to go. Fortunately I'm a morning person.
You gotta love those sugared cereals.
I was just curious, since I did recall that you had a full time job as well (thanks Bob for pointing that out - I thought I had included it). I just know that I'm tired as hell by 9 or 10 and getting up at 6:30 is torture.
Maybe I'm just a wimp. %)
Then again... considering I'm on here and I'm technically working... that is probably what you do as well, huh?
Author: Bev Vincent
Yep -- I spend the whole day in front of the computer working on web page layouts and adding material, or else writing or editing ad copy, application notes, brochures, things like that. So every now and then I take a break and see what's going on here. I don't go off on smoke breaks or chit-chat with my neighbors much, so this is my break!
Author: r1Pped
Mornings ! erg...... i hate mornings
Author: Bev Vincent
Between last night and this morning I got the changes for the first 340 pages into the manuscript. I felt like I got off to a slow start last night but then I got into this zone and I didn't quit until nearly 11:15, which is well past my usual bed time. A day from now, it'll be heading to New York.
Author: Jreitan47
I'm really loving my morning ritual of sitting down with my coffee at work and reading your latest progressions on your book, I look forward to it!
We expect a full report and pictures of your New York trip! (At least I do! lol) I read on Rosandra's site that some of the Remainders are going to be there...Amy Tan, Dave Barry and my pal, Kathi Goldmark. Please, if you see Kathi, tell her her favorite RBR groupie says “Hi”!
Author: Bev Vincent
Will do. I look forward to seeing lots and lots of people there. Pictures I'll take as I get the chance, but I'm not a real shutterbug and I tend to forget to take pictures, even though I drag the camera around with me! I'll do my best.
Author: Bev Vincent
It's done and on its way to New York -- or at least UPS is supposed to pick it up at the UPS store within the next hour or so. It'll be at NAL Monday before noon. I worked at it quite a bit last night, tweaking here, tightening there, adding a few more thoughts about the conclusion. Took it to Copy Club this morning to be printed and copied, sent it to their printer and went to have a bagel. Got back to find the print job had failed, so I sat there and waited for it to go through again. Fortunately the crossword puzzle in the paper this morning was more challenging than usual and it took me most of the time to finish it. Packed it up, took it to the UPS store at the other end of the strip center, and now it's done.
To celebrate, I mowed the lawn!
Author: eta6
So is your work on the book done? The rest is up to your editor, or is it coming back your way again?
Congratulations either way, though
Author: Bev Vincent
That's up to my editor. I know we have a little bit of work to do when we get some new information in the coming days, but I hope that the vast majority of the work on the text is done. I should know within a month or so, once Ron's had a chance to go through it again. In the meantime, on to other projects!
Author: Bev Vincent
So, it's in New York now and should be delivered to NAL shortly. I'm glad I got it out the door early on Saturday because if I hadn't I probably would have obsessed over it all weekend. As it was, I managed to get some other work that had been pending done and I made huge progress on my next Cemetery Dance column, due a week from Wednesday.
Hi there Bev,
I'm going to tell something funny. A bit at least.
When I heard about The Road to the Dark Tower I thought to myself “yepp, I'll get that book”. Naturally so, since I'm a DT junkie, why else am I here, right. At about the same time we also heard about Robin Furth's Concordance, that would be splited into two parts and the first part coming in the autumn of '03 would cover the four first parts in King's epic story. For some reason I got the impression that also your book, Bev, would be splited into two parts. The first part would be released in November '03 at the same time as DT 5.
So, now I was reading here and I saw that the book should be delivered to NAL and maybe there were a couple of things left to do, some editing or whatever. Since I knew that the first part was coming now in November I just thought that the editing was concerning the second part or maybe that some editing is possible so close to the release. Anyway, it didn't matter since I knew the book was going to be released now in November. From about the start of November I've been going into Amazon.com and all other net bookstores I could think of, searching after NAL's websites, searching after Bev Vincent on ISBN.nu, searching for The Road to the Dark Tower all over the place (or net, rather). And I just couldn't find a way to order it! Gaaaah. How can I order the god damn book. It should've been out a month already, and it didn't even have an ISBN code. What's up with that!?
Well, just about half an hour ago I was getting ready to sign on to your nice forum here and ask about how to order the book. Then I read in Bev's sig line:
The Road to the Dark Tower
NAL, November 2004
Wait a minute now... November, yeah that's right... but 2004. What year is it now? Doh! 2003. Correctamundo. I had to laugh at myself. So, I guess I have to wait one long year, huh?
It's funny how the human brain sometimes can interpret what you see and read in the way it wants to, just to suit some impression or idea that you have about something.
Author: Fishead
When Bev first started talking here about how things were going with the book I also got the impression that it was a 2 book thing he was doing and the first one was due out in NOV. 2003.Till it got closer and closer to the NOV. 2003 and Bev was still talking about sending stuff off to the editor for the next go thru. Then I looked at Bev's sig and realised it said 2004
Author: DTUK
Don't worry about it, Jo
For some reason my brain keeps telling me this is already 2004, lol
But saying that my local newspaper reported a thinny near my house, so maybe time displacement is becoming more fluid and am becoming here there and everywhere... ~0
Author: Bev Vincent
You're not the only ones, guys. We were a bit curious about why the Italian publisher was in such a rush to buy the translation rights and it turns out that they, too, misread the pub date and thought they would be publishing this fall, even though it was quite clear in all correspondence.
Author: Ronin
That is comedy.
Author: eta6
Bwahahaha. Oh dear. I guess I'm one of the few who didn't get confused. Oh well. I'll buy it for a dollar.