Tentatively finished with the mark up

Against my better judgment, I'm declaring myself done with this read through and mark up process. There's a lingering problem in the last chapter on a par with other problems that I have fixed along the way and that I ought to fix now. But it's the end of the week, and I want this not to be hanging over into the next week. Maybe I'll find time to think it through and tidy it up over the weekend, and I can always do it in a spare afternoon while I'm involved in the next round.

Next up, inputting all the changes I marked on the printed typescript into the Word doc. I'm wild guessing when I budget three weeks for that. Let's say by April 20.

The simple changes are going to be tedious and just require brute force to crank it out. (I'll probably burn my eyes out doing it. I went to the eye doctor the other day to talk to him about my eye strain. He reluctantly gave me a prescription for computer reading glasses but says the only real solution is spend less time on the computer.)

And the less simple changes--places where I cheated along the way and just made notes like "foreground x element in this section"--are going to require concentration, and it's impossible to estimate what kind of road blocks I'll hit then.

My initial goal during the process just finished was to cut 100 pp. At one point my trend was running higher so I though I might cut 135 pp. or more. There was less to cut as I got closer to the end, though. I ended up with an estimated 112 pp. cut, which would leave me with a typescript of about 427 pp. That's just eyeballing from the pencil marks on the printout though. I won't really know until all the changes are in the computer.

All right. Fresh start Monday. Pile the mess next to my computer and start again at page 1. I think of this as stage B of the sixth draft.