Monday, August 13, 2007

Chapters

I just noticed that after Chapter XXVIII I restart the numbers at XXIV instead of XXIX. One simple typo and my chapter numberings are messed up for the rest of the book. And--aw man--I did it again in the XXXs. Clearly, Roman numerals are just too complicated for me to handle. Total chapters is actually 62(?) + 3 introductions.

Monday, February 05, 2007

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools to the rescue!

Okay, so I said I was going to edit, but then didn't do anything beyond that first day. Poo on me.

But thanks to Google Webmaster Tools, I've just found a quite significant error: Hilfa's real name is Hilfa. [Edit: WTF? Hilsa. Hilfa's real name is Hilsa.)

Apparently, the top (read: only) query for my website is 'hilfa fish'. Initially, I thought I was polluting the results for people wanting to learn about the type of fish knows as the hilfa, but a bit of checking reveals that it's actually knows as a 'Hilsa'. In fact, I knew this initially. There is exactly one occurrence of 'Hilsa' in the entire novel, her initial entrance in Day 4. The other one hundred (exactly) mentions of her name all call her 'Hilfa'.

I suppose I'll just to a simple replace, but maybe I'll later insert a running joke where Fin keeps calling her 'Hilfa'.

Or I could add a line or two where she explains (or the narrator explains) that her father'd had a tendency to mispronounce words, and he'd named her 'Hilfa' due to this. Nah. s/Hilfa/Hilsa/g;

(I seem to remember having trouble remembering how to spell her name while writing, but I guess I never looked back to the initial spelling and just settled on the wrong one.)

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Editing has begun.

Okay, so I'm finally starting a bit of editing. I started by catting it all into one huge file. Then I went through updating the chapter titles to include chapter numbers and putting them in order. Just doing this made me realise, holy hell, this is long!

The chapter titles, of course, hae some problems. 'Deadlines Approaching' refers to me being nearing midnight, not something happening in the story. 'A Noisy Arrival in a Noisy Town' turned out not to have the arrival, which ended up happening in 'For Real This Time'.

There is no Chapter XXXXIII.


Then there's the actual content. Chapter II needs bit of fixing up. Chapter III needs to be scrapped or rewritten in full or something. Chapter XVII has to exist, but needs to be much, much better and well-thought-out. What else? I don't know. Lots.