Still Editing

I started a fresh edit today, working through the piece word by word. I have Italian in the story and at some point my grammar and spell check gave up and refused to work with the foreign phrases so I am literally having to spell check by hand, as it were.

It's not so bad, in that I am a decent speller, but by about page 80 my eyes started to cross. I'm cleaning up ellipses, dialogue tags, and adverbs, among other things. It's tedious work, but so necessary.

I'm now on page 96 and I wish I could forget the clean-up work I am doing and I could just read the story straight through. I hit the Finley passages a little while ago and I just want to move. He is such an intoxicating character - evil but incredibly addictive.

But, alas, I want a good clean copy of this story for the old bookshelf so I have to keep working through at a snail's pace.

Improvement

Every year, my goal is to read 52 books.

(not including the hundreds of children's books I read to my children every year)

Even though I didn't reach my goal, I did better than last year.

In 2009, I read 32 books.

In 2010, I read 40 books.

If I continue to increase by the same amount I will read 48 books in 2011 and 56 books in 2012. Although, if I were to go with these numbers, the growth would be exponential, meaning that in 2020, I would read 120 books.

That's insanity.

It's just not going to happen.

On the other hand, I am an amazonaholic. It's like putting a fully-stocked bar into an alcoholic's computer room. The access is easy and the draw is overwhelming. So, while it is possible that I would purchase or check out 120 books in 2020, I have no idea how I would find the time to read them all.

I think I will just stick with the 52 books goal.

Happy New Year Everyone!

I hope you all reach your goals this year, so long as it is not something crazy, like reading 120 books in a year.

I can't support that kind of insanity.