EdMo hours update and and a look at the schedule

Hours spent editing in March so far: 34 and 49 minutes

I don’t think I’ve actually talked about my NaNoEdMo schedule here before. I’ve built a special Excel spreadsheet to set my day-to-day editing targets, because it isn’t as simple as 1 hour, 37 minutes every day. I have more time available for editing on the weekends than weekdays for instance.

So, I set up a schedule with three types of days: weekends, weekdays, and Comicon. I knew I’d be crazy busy for Comicon, so that Sunday I only gave myself a target of an hour. Actually, I think I did a little less, but I’d done extra time the day before.

The weird thing about the schedule, though, is that there isn’t a single target per type of day otherwise. I’ve set up two formulas. For one, I’m only committing to doing 2 hours per weekend day, and I set the time for a weekday to make up the balance of getting to 50 hours in the month, which comes as a little less than an hour and a half on a weekday. For the other schedule, I only commit to an hour on a weekday, and set the weekends to make up the balance, which is over 3 hours every weekend day.

And generally, I don’t worry too much if I’m caught up on at least one of these schedules. They pass each other every week or so, so it doesn’t matter that much. If I’m actually ahead on both schedules, then I know I’m doing pretty well, and if I’m between, then there’s the second ‘stretch’ target a little ahead of me, encouraging me to keep going.

 

So, I guess that’s about it. 15 hours, eleven minutes to get done over the next nine days!

Critique tracking via spreadsheet

Well, the new draft of “The Landing” has been finalized, and sent off both to Chris McKitterick at the CSSF in Kansas, but also to Lightspeed magazine.

I was more than a little daunted by the prospect of going through the seventeen different critiques I received on the story from critters.org, ranging from one short paragraph all the way up to one critique approximately three-quarters the word count of the submitted story! I copied them all from my gmail into a single text file on Thursday night, and tried to go over some of them Friday night at Runnymede, but didn’t really get that far.

So, yesterday night, I finally got systematic. I set up an Excel spreadsheet file, starting one tab with a list of the different critiques, including the origin email, the starting and ending position in my text file, and working out how long each critique was in lines. This was then sorted in ascending order of length, so that I could start with the shorter critiques and work up progressively through longer and longer ones.

(I formatted the email addresses in white on a white background, to preserve the anonymity of critters.)