I was hand-editing the printed draft and discovered that when cobbling the full draft out of the individual chapter files I inadvertently copied one chapter twice.
That means my 190 page draft is really only 170 pages. It’s still 55,o00 words, which is what I’m aiming for with a book aimed at 13 year olds, but it’s discouraging.
2 responses to “Rewriting the Novel: Regression”
I read an article recently online, and the person had put the same paragraph in two separate places. At least you spotted this early enough to fix it! 🙂
(but also: it will likely grow and shrink repeatedly during the editing process… and I mostly know people for whom the editing-growing is a stronger symptom than editing-shrinking, although that may be a side-effect of most of my writing friends being nerds and academics. So. Individual symptoms may vary, but flux is fine/normal and good to allow.)
KC – I am always happy to see that type of thing. The web is so much easier to fix and so much more forgiving than print. Print mistakes get my wrath.