Thursday, April 16, 2015

N is for Numbers

Numbers! Can you hear yourself groan? Can you hear me? Remember I don't like numbers much but that isn't truly true. I don't like keeping track of most numbers. What do I owe the phone company? How many calories in a cheese Danish? But there are some numbers that are very helpful to be mindful of when revising. I should say that I find helpful. And what are they dear Jan?

How many pages, words, hours a day do I commit to in order to get through this revision?
When I get my ms back (and gosh I hope it is sooooon) I will have a general look see and then decide what the job is going to take. Are there red marks all through or major paragraphs of text from my adviser? Once I've ball-parked how much time I will need to spend, and ball-parked what time I have available and what external to the revising deadlines I might have (the mister and I are going on a little cruise up the coast to visit Northern communities this summer - think that might be one) then I'll know what numbers I need to crunch. It might look like this - I will spend one hour a day or 20 pages which ever comes first. My manuscript is 300 pages long so that will take me 15 days or so. Hmmm... I'm going to be on a bit of a work crunch in June with training so I better make sure I do

How many times do I repeat myself in the ms. (who cares how often I do in real life - well, I guess the mister cares!)
This means that I insert a program on a sampling of my writing that will do a word cluster for me - you know ...hmmm...what are they called? A word cloud and when it shows me a picture with the largest word being JUST - I'll go hunting those numbers. I know that doesn't seem like a number but in this case the program is doing it for you and making it all nice and graphic.

And today's pic is of Bella on top of the bank of snow next to our driveway. If you think she is awfully high up you'd be right. Any daffodils peeking their heads up would have to be 20 feet tall! Gah!



2 comments:

Susan Scott said...

Word cloud sounds good for crunching numbers, thanks Jan will investigate.
Lovely photo of Bella!

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Jan, for sharing what you do to get a different kind of look at your writing. It sounds useful! And that's one huge pile of snow! Wow! Bella looks regal atop it.