Welcome to Gaia! ::

I'm currently helping a close friend with something she's writing. She's gotten the first 50,000 words done (and I got drunk-dialed during her 1 am celebration of the 50,000th word) and we've moved on to the proofreading phase. She's not done but that's a good mile marker. I've read through all of it and am faced with a the difficult challenge of a manuscript that's good but not good enough. That sums up everyone's work, really, but this is right smack dab in the middle of "this needs more work but there's nothing obvious for me to comment on." Is it the exposition? The characters? Pace? I'm not quite sure. I'll probably need to sit down and seriously think on what's bugging me about it and then sit and think even more on how to explain it.

Or maybe I'll get drunk and call her at 1 am with suggestions. She how SHE likes it. twisted

On the upside, the story is interesting and good enough that I enjoy reading it. It's not one of those you have to force yourself through - by no means. I'm quite enjoying it.

That's not proofreading - that's the beta editing phase. Alpha phase was her writing it herself. As the second go round, it's just beta. Proofreading is the final read-through for typos and punctuation.

It might help for you to read through it once, quickly, then go back and read it again, maybe commenting chapter by chapter or scene by scene on which scenes grabbed you and why, and which weren't particularly compelling.

I've finished my first read-through and can go back and heavily edit next, I suppose. I wonder if this would be easier on print instead of on the computer but I don't want to print out that many pages. I should see if she wants to visit at some point. It'd be easiest to pick out some of the issues person to person.