Line editing and other work

More work today like how I finished last week. I picked a chapter unlikely to be cut or to need much development work and just concentrated on line editing.

I had visions of wielding an expert hammer and chisel that let the masterpiece underneath the lumpy stone emerge, but I'm having trouble getting into the right mind set. I don't think I'm seeing the language critically enough. I feel like I'm coasting. It's too familiar maybe. So far, the changes aren't very aggressive. On the other hand, maybe I've done such a good job up to now that it doesn't need much of that kind of work. That's wishful thinking I suppose. It will probably just take time to train my brain to get in the right critical zone. When I do, I may have to circle back to these first chapters and work on them again.

So I got a complete 21-page chapter done today. (Chapter 6 in the current numbering.) However, it took more than just the regular a.m. session. I had to come back to it after that break to finish the line editing. Also I didn't just stick to line editing after all because I found another relatively small clarification/development problem that I needed to let sit over lunch and then come back to again. I have an uneasy feeling that the chapter as a whole doesn't have the tension it should, so maybe it will need more development work after all.

I'm finding more continuity problems. A piece of gear in the plot is stored in a hallway closet in this chapter but I know at another point I have it in a bedroom closet. Again, how did I never notice this before?

Made some more notes over the weekend on the second book. I'm thinking a lot lately about genre.

Continuity

I had an amusing little encounter with a continuity problem during my work this morning. There's a scene that takes place in a car over about six pages. Near the beginning, I mention the car being put in gear and in so doing I mention reaching to the steering wheel column. The shifter is on the column. (Probably an automatic, though a few trucks have had standard transmissions with the shifter on the column.) At the end of the scene, I have a character moving from the passenger seat to the driver's seat by crawling "over the handbrake and stick shift."

I know how this happened is that I decided at one point to change the make of this car, and when I did so I did a little research and looked for images on google and ended up using that to revise one scene but forgot about the other.

What's amusing to me is that this kind of thing is still in there after so many readings. How have I not caught this before? And what else is lurking in there? Whenever I catch something like this in a published novel I'm always puzzled that the author and editor, who are presumably intimately familiar with every detail in the book, didn't catch it before, but I guess from this side of the table I can see that there are so many details to keep track of it's almost inevitable that I'll miss some.