The Editing Marathon of a Whole Bunch of Editing continued through most of today. I didn’t get all the way to the end of the book–but I did make it about two-thirds of the way through.
Most of the changes my editor’s asked for continue to be small. Amusingly, though, a couple of the side characters have now been tweaked a bit. Jude’s ethnicity has changed a bit and Carson is now a Seattle native; I decided I needed a bit more representation of Seattle-born characters in the cast, in no small part because both of Seattle’s Warders in this book aren’t from Seattle at all.
Out of general technical interest I tried briefly to load my revision version of the manuscript into Open Office, just to see whether it would handle all the change-tracking stuff. The answer to this question, for those of you who might be interested, is “somewhat”. I did notice that the program had noted various changes that had been done, displaying the old text with strikethrough and the new text in blue. But it wasn’t nearly as cleanly handled as it is in Word.
So I guess when any future manuscripts of mine go into beta reading mode or (fingers crossed) being edited by actual editors, I’ll need to stick to Word for change tracking purposes. It’s just too damned useful that way.
Edited today and tonight: Up to the end of Chapter 16. Seven more chapters to go!