Passage to Jarpara Update

 

I've finished the second and the final third draft of Passage to Jarpara. The third draft is where I read it on an ebook reader, and hopefully just find things to tweak in the text. That was the case this time, so now the story is what it is. With those drafts behind me, I've shifted to the proofreading process. The first step is uploading the LibreOffice document to Google Drive and then opening it in Google Docs. While I write it in LibreOffice, that program does not have a very robust grammar checking function. Google Docs does, so opening it in Google Docs and making most of the corrections it suggests saves a lot of work for my wife and other beta readers. And trust me, it is discouraging to see all the little words that I seemed to have read in the three to six times I've read parts of the story that aren't really there. I guess I read what I expect to read, even if the words aren't actually there.

This year, for the first time ever, I'm also going to run the book through the Grammarly. I did one chapter last night, and Grammarly did find things to change as well. It likes hyphenated words, like white-painted, instead of white painted, and has its opinion on comas. Seeing that these are things that I have no strong opinion on, I'm going along with these changes. There are a few things that I like and will keep, despite neither Google Docs or Grammarly liking it, chief among them is the use of "to" instead of "at" as in  "I looked to Lessie" instead of the AI proofreaders' "I looked at Lessie." 

After all this automated proofreading is done, I usually turn it over to my wife to proofread, and then, after she has found more mistakes, it is off to my volunteer beta readers. However, I'm thinking that with the addition of Grammarly's proofreading skills, I might be able to send the story off to my beta readers in good conscious before my wife has completed her read through. That will depend how clean of a copy she finds after reading a chapter or two. If she finds no errors, off it goes.

In any event, I'm looking to release the book on either 21 March or 28 March 2024, unless something unexpected crops up. I should be able to give you a definite date next week. Stay tuned.