A Brief Pause for Breath
Added 2025-09-18 11:00:14 +0000 UTCI've now finished two redlining passes and am taking a brief pause before beginning another. I find that it's important to have a little bit of space between editorial passes - roughly two weeks is generally enough. When we're talking first vs. second pass, there doesn't need to be much of a gap, since the time it takes me to run through the second pass is long enough that the work I did during the first pass is a decent distance in the rear view. That's less true of the second vs. the third pass, because each redline pass tends to go a little more quickly; I'm more confirming that all my comments make sense and are internally consistent than looking for new things to nitpick (although I still do a fair amount of nitpicking).
This doesn't mean that I'm idle. Remember how I still have an introduction, fiction, and first chapter to write? That's what I'm working on this week. I've been wool-gathering, so far - just sketching out the sub-outline of these sections and maybe writing down a couple of turns of phrase I think will work in the draft that emerges. I'll likely resume redlines next week; my goal is to wrap them up by the end of the month so that writers can revise.
