LOL - draft NINE and finally reading a hard copy, and holy cow!

My neck has finally convinced me that I spend too many hours hunched over a laptop, so last night I printed out the first sixty pages of my WIP which has been through eight rounds of refinement. (I have long intended to have a revision round that was solely "read through a printed copy" but hadn't done that one yet.)

I thought the WIP was getting pretty good, until I printed it out!

Now, hard copy always read different to me than electronic, but holy cow! The number of errors I am spotting on draft #9 has me laughing, then crying, then stomping off, then coming back to tackle another page. Every kind of error imaginable - POV, comma splices, paragraph breaks, weak word choice, Everything!

(So, I decided to share the frustration and discovery with fellow writers in the office party!)

Well, this is probably too much laptop time for my neck, so back to the hard copy.

I am *certain* draft 10 will be good. (ha! Right!)

Thanks! Yes, definitely.

Even knowing that, and trying to read the electronic copy knowing it, is no substitute for printing and reading it!

Heheh, glad it's not just me.

YES!!!!!!!

Thanks!! I'll have to try the font trick next. I'm halfway through the hard copy.

I am LOL'ing right now because apparently I like to make all of my characters vomit.

At the least provocation.

Oh this is fun!

Well, the next revision is going to be that index card trick that people have been talking about.

Everyone that's offered to take a look at it sets the story down at chapter 5, and then again at 17, and then again at 21. I'm trying to figure out why. Definitely the chapter length and punctuation and grammar make chapter 15/16 hard. So I'm glad that's getting sorted. And the beginning is a mess for other reasons. And the ending has problems.

And I don't like that it reads as young as it does.

(But the fact that all my characters all vomit at one point or another was nowhere on my radar! Ha! )