Last night, I finished the second draft of my Mermaid Story. Nice to be done with the arduous task of evaluation and analysis of each individual sentence. It'll be good to put the critic away for a while, at least for this work.
What do I have next? Well, just because I finished the text doesn't mean I can just save it in a folder, and forget about it for a while. There's meta stuff I have to do. Those include.
1. Fix a few artifacts in the plot (stuff that was true before I changed a plot point)
2. Run all my macros on the manuscript (this calls attention to things like adverbs, passive voice, sentence length, etc.). This'll help me fix all the niggling bits that can be corrected at the sentence level without needing to pay attention to the plot.
3. Spell check
And also I can start on the Merm-8 soundtrack. Every large work I make seems to have a soundtrack to it (I'm not sure if I ever mentioned the soundtrack to Black Hole Son), so I make a CD compiling songs that are associated with it. I make a CD cover and everything.
Also, I'm going to make a book out of this using Lulu.com. I try and give my works to my wife to read, but a three-ring binder isn't the easiest thing to take with you. But lulu.com can apparently make your work into a binded paperback. And it comes recommended from Scalzi.
So now I leave the world of the ocean and mermaids and go back to some short stories for a while. Maybe I'll work on the pre-writing for this world I'm creating. Maybe I'll read some.
And how am I going to celebrate this accomplishment? Going out for sushi.Labels: Lulu, Mermaid Story, soundtrack