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Saturday, May 22, 2004

Third Revision Progress

"Third revision? I thought you weren't done with the second revision yet."

Well, yes and no. While I'm less than 70% done with the second revision, A Phoenix in Darkness is written in five parts (as I've mentioned earlier), each of which is 5500-7000 words long. By contrast, "A Stranger in the Library" is just under 6000 words long (which, not coincidentally, is the word limit for short story submissions for most print magazines). So I've finished the second revision on the first three of those parts, and I'm now on the fourth--which is on track to be done this weekend. I sent the first part to my "editors" (family members and friends whom I trust to read the story and comment on it) a couple of weeks ago, and they've finally gotten back to me with their comments. I'll soon send the second part to them, and I'm hoping that they'll be working on the third part by the time I finish the second revision. At that point, it's on to the third revision, which takes their comments into account and makes corrections. So far the most important comment I've received is that the there's not enough background in the first part, and too much reader knowledge is taken for granted. This is one of those things that's easy for me to miss: having written quite a bit of material in this world, I sometimes forget that not everyone has read it. This is bad news for me, since it's going to require some extensive additions to the first part, but good news for the readers, since the first part gets longer. Once I've made those additions, I'll polish and spell-check (I don't spell-check until the end, because spell-checking is a pain and not very useful while I'm still doing significant rewrites), then post the first part. And yes, I plan to do that before I'm done with the third revision for all the parts. If things go smoothly, a new part will be posted every two weeks. I expect I will start in two or three weeks.

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