Now that I’ve gotten about 2 dozen people’s written comments on the first 25 pages of my novel Two Women and a Boat, it’s time to do something about them. But I’m not the kind of person who can pull up an electronic document, pick up a pile of markups, and just dive in. I’m more methodical. More anal.
WHAT I’M SOLVING FOR:
- Much of the feedback, like typos and grammatical errors, is the same throughout all the edited manuscripts.
- I won’t act on all the feedback I get from each critic.
- I don’t want to have to keep going back and forth over those 25 pages over and over. I want to be able to go through and correct all the typos, then all the single-line fixes, then all the global fixes, etc.
- I want to keep track of who gave what feedback.
- I want to be able to incorporate the recommended grammatical fixes from all seminars/classes/lectures.
I don’t mind taking a little more up-front time to create a system that will save me time later, but I’m not a natural programmer (unlike my amazing husband). I can’t just look at a pile of data and order it in a way that will get me what I wanted. After four tries, I think I’ve come up with a database that I think is perfect.
It captures the name of the critic, a description of the correction, the date it was entered and the date it was completed, the manuscript version, and, the touch that I really feel will make a difference in my ease of editing, a field for correction type. I’m all excited now because it means that I can power through these 24 packets of comments, enter them into a single long list, add in all the rules that I know I should be looking for in my whole manuscript, and THEN sort by the type of correction I’m making. I can do all the globals at once. I can fix all the typos in one sitting. All the missed words, all the added words, all the local changes…
And now I’m going to get back to it.
I Love You But Fuck Off 
See, here’s a difference: you see the database as a tool to get your actual work done. I see the work as an excuse to fool around with the database. There’s a reason that, “It was perfect, so I fixed it,” was said often in the apartment full of computer science majors.
This is why you’re so good at what you do. I could never be you. Which means I get my own work done. 😉
Hmm…maybe I should steal your idea and generate something like it for managing the feedback I get at work.
It’s just a bug tracking system, so it’s not like I invented something totally new. In fact, I shamelessly stole the idea from the Pirate. The hardest thing for me is always defining the critical bits of information and then setting up the relationships in the right way. Lucky for me, I used to work at a database company and had the benefit of some really great teachers.