I'm still a ways off from needing them (only half way through my word goal for my novel), I've been looking at tools to help with my initial rounds of edits. I had been toying with doing an initial round of edits after the first half of the novel was done, starting in May - this was because I had initially planned to do both rounds of Camp NaNoWriMo, with half the novel in April and half in June so had a month between to do something else.
However, while I know there are some serious structural edits I need to make and a myriad of copy edits, I've decided to keep working on the work in progress through May and then, after some very rough work, put it away for a few months before tackling serious edits. Either way, I was going to have to get a mental handle on HOW to do edits sooner or later. To that end, I've been using some of my precious writing time (when the words just would not flow) to look for some best practices in editing a manuscript. I found a number of services that would do it for me (for fees of course, which is fine, but not what I'm looknig for), a number of blog posts about how to tackle self-edits, which I will certainly use when the time comes and thus will talk about then. In trolling through the interwebs, I did find a few tools that I found interesting and will put through their paces at the end of writing, before I put the book away to ferment for a while. The first of these is a website called ProWritingAid. It's an interesting series of tools that analyzes text for things like grammar and punctuation, but also for passive verbs, "sticky" aka filler words, sentence length and complexity and so on. For now, I think I'm going to work with their free trial but imagine if I get any sort of good results, I will go ahead and drop the cash for the subscription. The only feature that I think I'll be missing in the free version is the fact that it will only analyze the first 500 words of any upload and since all of my scenes are a minimum of 1000+, this will certainly become annoying rather quickly. Pricing isn't terrible, starting around $55 per year as of this writing (there's a 25% quarantine discount so may jump on that) and if I love it I may go ahead and get the lifetime subscription. It's about the equivalent of 4-5 years at the 1-year price, but then after that... guess it depends how long I think I'll stick with writing, doesn't it? The optimist says go for it, as I'll be doing this for a few decades! The second is a downloadable app called Ginger that is a grammar checker. As I mentioned, ProWritingAid also has a grammar check, but just like with beta readers and doctors, I want to get a second opinion since not all grammar rules are created equal. Again, this one is free, and while it does have a paid upgrade, the features that offers don't interest me so I doubt I'll be investing there. Currently, the plan is to finish the WIP by the end of May; find and replace all my XXXs (I use this when I need a name for a minor character that needs zero background, just a name); run it through both ProWritingAid and Ginger, correcting any glaring errors, make notes on any suggestions that would take more than a quick word change, and then put the thing in a drawer some place to percolate. On that note, at least for the time being, percolate currently defined as: the Scrivener file saved on Dropbox, as per usual; plus a word/txt doc emailed to myself; plus a hard copy print out in a drawer since I'm sure this is how I'll start my revisions when the time finally comes. Of course, all of this is just over a month away and things are definitely going to change. Once I get to that point, I'll post updates on just exactly how that went, what worked and what didn't, any additional tools I found along the way, and next steps.
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