Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Yes, that number has loomed larger. But fear not, many are more like markers than problems, placeholders to remind me where to make consistency fixes, which shall be removed with great joy in large chunks as their time to be resolved arrives.

In short, I am making a kind of cat’s cradle, and though it may look more complex and imposing than it did last week, my expectation is that it will all resolve from chaos to a nice clean X in a miraculous twinkle of a prestidigitator’s eye. In the next three weeks. And breathe.

I have resolved some former members of the 43, 5-10 of them probably, with others left more as markers than as problems. I elected to go from the start of the book and go through things as they came up, while having mental notes of some things I knew I wanted to change as I went along, and so resolving those issues when I finally came to the comment referencing them in the text, and then deleting said comment—job done! I am over halfway through the book now on this pass, and midway through multiple simultaneous different clean up operations. This may sound awful, but it makes sense to me and is not in the least overwhelming. Honestly, I’m quite calm, at present, about the whole thing.

Of course I do have some of the trickiest issues still to face, but going through them chronologically seems a coherent approach, rather than dipping in and out of the manuscript one random problem at a time. That could easily lead to things being disjointed. This way, with my Shade of Hemingway as guide, I can keep the whole easily in mind as I make changes, and thus hopefully not throw anything too far out of balance.

I’ve noticed one continuity error so far, so that is pleasing, and easy to resolve: it is now in my mental to-do, and shall be slotted in where the text best accommodates it as I move forward. I did add a comment highlighting it, in case I forget as I advance, but it has to go in fairly soon, so I think I’ll get it tonight before bed.

So there you have it folks: sometimes to make progress you need to go backwards, with a plan. Next week we’ll find out if this is all cheap talk before hitting a wall of despair, or a vindication of the Really Detailed Plan™ and edit-as-I-go technique. How exciting!