It might surprise you to know I read what I've written. Sometimes when I'm reading a story on SOL, I sit up straight at something I've read and say, "Does this author have any idea what he just said?" Oh, in a different mood, I'd read right over it and, assuming the story was the least bit engaging, just pass it off as a mistake and no big deal.
But when I find something like that in one of my own stories, I go ballistic.
"How could I have missed something so stupid?" "How did I misspell that?" "When did I say she had a sister?" "Oh, shit! What am I going to do now?" Etc.
Not that it's usual to find real weenies in things I've posted. Old Rotorhead and Pixel the Cat clean up uncounted errors before I start putting the stories on line. Michele, Lyndsy, and Jason all do a fabulous job of critiquing and improving my mainstream storylines and character arcs (Wayzgoose) and Colleen and Margaret are phenomenally sharp proofreaders.
But it irritates me no end when I have to go back 30 chapters or so to correct something that I've just made impossible with where I've taken the story. Take this little tidbit posted earlier this week in Double Take: "I've got an older sister, too. She's in service this year so I don't get to see her much." Wait! Rebeca has an older sister? A little tidbit that I have totally ignored for the next seventy chapters!
That's not unreasonable for the development of the story arc. Rebeca is revealed through her relationship with Jacob. Her sister is away in Service. But suddenly I have a plot point that needs to get developed in the next book (3). And in seventeen months since Jacob's transmogrification, Beca's sister is only mentioned once.
And how did I even discover that?
It's part of my writing process.
I write very fast. Typically, between 3,000 and 10,000 words a day. This week, I totaled 37,000 words. But writing them isn't all I do. Here's the step by step process:
1. First draft. When I'm thinking smoothly, it is not unusual for me to write a chapter of Double Take in a day. Not every day, but the 3,500-word average length of those chapters is a day's work.
2. I immediately post the chapter on my website for my $10/month patrons to read. (patreon.com/aroslav) They want to see the material as it flows from my pen, as it were, and will overlook typos and story inconsistencies just so they can be reading Chapter 76 today while SOL fans are reading Chapter 14. Yeah. They're that far ahead. I call them my Sausage Grinders.
3. I re-read the chapter, usually over the course of writing the next one or two. I focus on story things and often go back to correct things that I spot later. What color is Beca's hair? Light brown? Why is she referred to as a blonde in this chapter? Inquiring minds want to know.
4. When I've accumulated an entire 'Part' of chapters (usually 10-12 chapters) I gather them all together and send them off to Rotorhead and Pixel. The list of these two guys' clients is a Who's Who of SOL authors. Some of the best and cleanest stories on the site have been through their watchful hands. Which I know is a mixed metaphor, but they didn't edit this.
5. When the chapters are returned, I compare and consolidate the notes.
6. I hand-code every individual chapter in html. I do that for a couple of reasons, even though Vixen sometimes ignores my careful coding. First, I think it gives me better output on SOL, but more importantly, it helps facilitate the quick conversion to my own website and to eBook. So I code the correct quotation marks, the character entities, the bold, italic and line breaks that are needed. Many times during this process, I discover formatting corrections. A quotation wasn't italicized. The poetry all ran into one line.
7. I read the chapter in a browser. Everything up to this point has been done in Word or in my html editor. Believe me when I say that you see the story differently in a browser. That means that I make corrections to this draft. It's typical to see a missing quotation mark, for example. And I hate when the same word is used too frequently within a paragraph. Half the time I need a different word and the other half it should be cut completely. Sometimes, I still see sentences that are so poorly constructed I have to completely rewrite them. But I do, correcting the html before I upload the chapters in the queue for posting (three or four months from now).
8. The Doctype on SOL is simple html. My website is coded in xhtml. That requires some amount of conversion, however, my having converted all entities when I originally converted to html and saved them as UTF8 characters makes the conversion process go pretty smoothly. My website has a different look and feel than SOL, so I open the page in the browser to take a look once more. I've added contents and navigation to the page and I check to make sure it all works and that all the graphics I use between scenes have all appeared. I scan through the document again and occasionally still see a stray typo or missing format. At this stage, when I correct it, I go back and correct the SOL version, too.
9. I upload the new pages in my own queue for posting to my Advance Release ($5/mo) patrons. They want delivery of the story faster than it comes out on SOL but aren't willing to put up with the raw text of the Sausage Grinder. For example, today they are reading the end of Part II: Inculcation (chapter 22) while SOL readers are reading chapter 14. (patreon.com/aroslav)
10. Three to five months down the road, the chapter posts on SOL. I read it. After it's posted. Sometimes I still find an error or a reader sends me a message about one. I correct it if it seems important. Other times, I'll simply say, well that's what's in this version. I'll correct the eBook.
So, that's my easy ten-step process for writing the stories that appear here on SOL and on my own website. There are another half-dozen steps involved before I release a commercial eBook and paperback. It's not perfect but I'd put any of my books up against a Dan Brown commercially published best seller and come out with fewer errors. One of my own story editors was so appalled by Brown's latest work that she marked up the entire first chapter and sent it to him asking why his editors let this go out!
Well, this was all interesting-to me. I suppose I lost most of you before #1 above. If you made it this far, please take away this understanding. I'm not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But I care about what I write and I want you to enjoy it without obstacles.