Tweaks and Polishes

Took all of December away from the novel, started the New Year by diving into tweaks and polishes. And corrections. Lots and lots of corrections. The problem with making the contest mailing deadline by barely more than minutes is I did not have time for a careful proofread of a printed copy. Now that I've been away from it for awhile, and reading a printout rather than onscreen, I'm appalled at the number of typos/editos lurking in there.

Oh well. The main goal was to get it DONE and out the door to somewhere. Yeah, I could have held onto it, taken my time, made it as close to perfect as it will get, then submitted it to the next contest round a year later. But geeze, I didn't want to wait a year.

And now I'm cleaning up. The messiest bits have turned out to be the ones I edited the most (in a hurry): lots of little glitches resulted that I didn't have a chance to search out and destroy.

So, as of today we're 2/3 of the way through January and I'm only about 1/4 of the way through the tweaks and polishes I'd hoped to have done by the end of the month. But that was with plenty of wiggle room, so no biggie. Yet. We'll see how much progress I can make by, say, Valentine's Day.

In addition to essential cleanup, I am also looking for opportunities to:
~ bolster place/character descriptions (a bit thin in current draft)
~ enhance "mood" and "tone" in a few key places (wanna make it just a bit creepier without getting too woo-woo: a fine line to tread)
~ fine-tune pacing and dialogue, especially in the draggy bits

All that non-structural stuff (the tiny details that aren't all that important one sentence at a time, but adds up to a major difference in the quality of the whole) needs more attention. Just gotta slog through it. Some days it's smooth going, others it's an effort to keep butt in chair.