The End is in Sight!

I may be a little premature in saying this, but I can almost see then end of this draft. I passed into the final third over the weekend and I feel like I’m finally in the home stretch. It’s definitely coming easier now that I’m back in the editing groove (funny how that works) and it’s amazing how everything else tends to fall into place when I get my writing head on straight.

One thing I’m extra excited about is when I finish this draft, I’m going to PRINT IT. The ink for my printer in Mexico was too expensive to print anything but the necessities, so my mom printed one draft for me last winter, and one draft of my first novel the previous visit home, and that’s it. I haven’t even printed my short stories.

My office has a giant mongo printer (which, yanno, I think I’ll call it Mongo) that prints something like 20 pages per minute and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than an office supply store. I’m holding myself to the September 1st deadline for edits, but I think I’ll allow myself the days between then and Labor Day weekend to do edits on the hard copy.

You know what this means? I finally get to use a red pen!!

22 Comments

  1. ab

    Squee! It’s amazing what we catch on print that we just don’t on screen. Awesome – just go plant a tree to balance out the universe 😉

  2. Nadine

    Yay for printing it out! There’s something to be said about the actual copy in your hands and not on the screen. Hmm.. I think I just justified why I don’t have a kindle. Oh, and of course there’s that whole money thing 🙂

  3. It’s so nice working on a printout. I haven’t done it in a long time. I bought a new printer. A few weeks later, the cyan was gone, despite the fact I only print in black. It’s been a giant paperweight while we try to decide on which ink refill system to buy. I’m done with twenty-dollar-a-pop cartridges.

    • Avery, we were just talking about something along these lines at work. If you don’t select B&W print and just hit print, your printer will automatically print it in color. (or at least a lot of them will.) You need to actually select Black ink.

  4. bigwords88

    How much red pen are you expecting to use? Is it just a few notes here and there, or are you expecting to make the pages look like a scene from a Peckinpah film?

    Good luck with the editing. 🙂

  5. Melanie, I hate to tell you how many times I printed my manuscript and revised and hand-edited before it was ready for publication. Reading on paper is just different – you can enrich the pages immeasurably when you read them and pencil in fixes. I use a Dell laser printer that was pretty cheap – the cartridge lasts for about 6,000 copies and runs $85 or so. If you run it on “draft” mode you can get even more copies – and of course I always reuse pages to print something else on the back of. So if you can swing it at all, my advise is to print it a few more times before querying. (OK, after some test readers review it!) Best of luck.

    • Sara, I completely agree that it’s important to proof on paper. I do that at work and do at home whenever I can. The only reason I hadn’t while in Mexico is it was very expensive. $85 is roughly a week’s salary down there, and it’s hard to justify spending 60 hours worth of work on a printer cartridge. Now that I’m back in the real world, I can. 🙂

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