Today I finished my last major revision of In the Meadow, and also finished the rough draft of Our Daughter! I’m really excited. Since starting this streak of four thousand words a day, I’ve seem some really good progress. I can’t wait to see where I stand after doing this for a year.

Because I’m done with my major revisions of In the Meadow, now I will be moving this project onto the final phase before releasing it to the public. This is where I go through each scene and edit until it is complete. Sometimes that takes many, many passes (often 10 or more). These are typically between 500 and 3000 word scenes, which I copy into a text to speech program, which I can also follow along with (to catch mechanics), and then just listen/read the scene and make changes to the text in Scrivener on the fly. Sometimes I’ll gather up the changes by taking notes, or I will just hop back and forth between programs. Each pass or change, I then re-copy the text back into the text to speech and listen to it again from the beginning. Once I can listen to the whole scene without feeling the tug to change or tweak something, then I mark it as complete and move on to the next.

Because of this approach, it’s not realistic to mark progress by word count any longer, since I sometimes can edit upwards of 10000 words or more in one session. So, what I will do during this final leg is do a word count up to 3000 and then simply stop counting.

As for my writing goals, I will begin tomorrow on the much anticipated sequel to Seeking Light Aurora.

(I wrote 1002 words and edited 3000 words today)