Project Update November 2026
By Rare Hydrogen
Since my last update.
Back in October, I missed my original deadline (10/1) then my second deadline (10/15), and I’ll probably miss this third deadline as well (11/15). Why am I missing these milestones? Good question. I think it’s a combination of burnout and scheduling. The editor needed a full week with my manuscript, but I couldn’t actually get it out to them until November. Their part is done now, but I have to read all their edits and apply the ones I like… and we’re talking about hundreds of line-by-line changes.
On top of that, I need to do a full copyedit to make sure my words are spelled correctly and my sentences have periods. And then I need to drop the whole thing into Sigil, a code-editor for EPUB and reformat it from Markdown to EPUB. Then I get to think about where to platform and package the ebook (Amazon / Overdrive) etc. I’m probably ignoring a step or two in-between then and now.
That said, draft #4 was completed and sent off, so the goals for October were completed. Hooray!
A brief personal note
Things feel chaotic again. I feel as if I am slipping back into the ether, where my ghost body cannot affect things in the real world. I have at least 50 things in my todo list at any given time, and other projects and priorities are getting sidelined or stalling out completely.
Some thoughts on the editing process
It’s hard not to be hostile during the editing process. I’m trying my best to be level-headed and evaluate each comment on its own. I’ve been on both sides of this before, and I trust my editor isn’t making notes just for shits and giggles; he actively wants to help me make the best possible book. For that I’m grateful.
However, there are A LOT of edits, and they’re mostly about using the passive voice.
Passive Voice
For the record, I know what passive voice is. I use it for three reasons:
- I’m adding voice with Dice’s internal monologue.
- I’m speeding past the boring parts between the scenes / action I actually care about and that matter for the story.
- I’m lazy.
Obviously, laziness is a problem. But the other two I think have more merit in fiction. I’ve read some over-active pieces that feel like absolute slogs. Like, ‘Oh, now I have to read three pages about driving his kids to school in a minivan? Great.’ and that’s no fun. I would rather go slow on the cool shit and speed-over the boring stuff.
Here are some of the things I’d hoped developmental editing would have addressed:
- Given that this story is set 2000 years in the future, is it a good idea to use Euro-style dates (dd/MM/yyyy) instead of US-style dates (MM/dd/yyyy)?
- Before each chapter, I write an Epigraph for flavor text (news blurbs, speeches, court docs). Did I handle attribution and formatting correctly for those?
- Is my plot exciting? Are there parts that will give people the ick?
- Are there any plotholes?
- If this is 2000 years in the future, shouldn’t the network / domain security for the corporation be hardened against the kind of hacking described in the book?
A debugger for writing
This whole journey has taught me one thing: I miss my debugger.
When a programmer writes code with an IDE, they can usually rely on a tool called a debugger. It allows the programmer to pause the execution at any time, and inspect all the variables and calculations to see how their code is working. It can tell you things like function x is broken, or function y is doing something you don’t want it to, which can be traced back to a larger issue.
In writing, I don’t have anything close to that. Spellcheck is a pale comparison. I want to know what is going on in the brain of my reader, and not just one reader, but many. I wish I could get real-time traces of the readers thoughts and feelings, and store them in an easily searchable way. I think it would help me produce better writing. Or maybe I would be more confident in the things I produce.
It would also give me the fast-feedback I crave. It has been months and months of writing, and I’m unsure if anyone will find any value in what I’ve created. It is a dark, soul-sucking feeling, and piles on top of the burnout I was describing above. If I could get a writing debugger, maybe I could build some of the confidence I gained when I first learned to code by bashing my head against the wall until my Python script worked.
Goals for November
- Address all the editor’s comments
- Finish formatting the EPUB
- Make the book available for purchase / download
These goals look too ambitious. Let me try again:
- Address all the editor’s comments.
- Do a full proofread.
- Start formatting the EPUB.