Process

This post is about process. Believe me, I'm as unhappy about it as you are.
I have eliminated most of the active chapter's red ink. Only two notes remain. A reasonable person might reasonably assume that once those notes are eliminated, a brief run through the chapter for basic grammar and anything which catches the eye would be all that remained before the chapter could be considered complete. That person would be wrong. Once those two notes are eliminated, I will go through the chapter word by word, sentence by sentence, and paragraph by paragraph and I will examine everything.
The two notes are worthy of further mention as well. Sometimes my notes are very specific, like a red line with no explanation means whatever the red line covers should be removed. Easy enough, right? Sometimes my notes are less specific, like a circle around a couple of sentences with the note "more Christ allusions". This requires some creativity, but it's still a fairly straightforward exercise. Sometimes my notes are broad and vague, like a circle around three paragraphs with the note "make this better". Those can be challenging, as I'm sure you can imagine. The two remaining notes in this chapter are along the lines of "make this spectacular" and "explore this character more in this section and make it insightful and complex, yet subtle and touching".

-Cary