Sunday, January 30, 2011

For Those About to Read...

All right, all right. Deek of Type Clack has been shamelessly flogging my 2009 NaNo draft, without any sort of encouragement from me (private to Deek: your check is in the mail.) I did finally -- finally! -- finish reading through and cleaning up my initial transcription, and posted it online as a Google doc. It's tucked away here, on a page that might become home to similar such things, if I'm so inclined. Deek has been generous with the praise, as has Duffy, who saw an earlier, less cleaned-up draft. I'm still waiting on that other shoe.

There are still a number of problems, mostly of the odd or duplicate word: most of this work was undoing the erratic "fixes" imposed by the automatic spell checker. I have not re-read it all the way through again, but I'll update it in place when I get a chance.

I'm happily accepting any and all comments, suggestions, improvements, and (of course) faint praise. If you need me, I'll be over here in the corner, curled up all fetal and humming to myself.

EDIT: I'm also learning how to use Google documents, so if I suddenly break the link, be patient. I may be putting an update in place. Or erasing all my hard work. You know, either way.

4 comments:

deek said...

It really is a pretty clean read, at this point. For 57,000 words, there's only a couple dozen duplicate words or extra words to be found, and they are all easy to read through.

I only found one scene that didn't make sense. Mike, I'll send this privately, so as not to spoil anything.

notagain said...

I always turn of spell check, and even when I do use it I end up adding a lot of words. In an invented world with a lot of newly coined words it must be really aggravating. What I really want is for computational linguistics to catch up and let us tell spell-check the part of speech so when an "s" is added it doesn't say HEY BAD SPELLING!

mpclemens said...

Spell-check (or it's more evil cousin, Auto-correct) must be responsible for a number of the gaffes in the original transcription. I'm a poor typist, but not that poor. From now on, if I import from an AlphaSmart, I'm doing it into software that doesn't correct what I type as it goes, but lets the wrongness stand.

notagain said...

I just noticed in my comment I'd typed "of" when I meant "off," an error that spell-check wouldn't have prevented anyway. In my defense, that's the side with the wrist fracture.