Final Rewrite, The Dead Spend No Gold.

This should take about a week.

Got the edited manuscript back from Lara and I'm going through it quickly.

Most of her changes are obvious improvements.

The only place she and I seem to disagree is the use of "had" in past tenses.  She prefers to use "had" whenever appropriate.  I try to use "was" as often as possible, even if it isn't technically correct.

There are a few other places where she is formally grammatically and/or tense correct, but I feel incorrect is better.  Hard to explain, it's just a feeling. 

She's going to go through it one more time and I'm going to ask her to again put in what she thinks is proper and I'll have one more chance to decide if I agree or not.

It would probably be safer just to click acceptance, but...well, sometimes not quite right is better.

Nevertheless, going through her changes will be relatively quick.

Consolidating Bren's new critique will take much longer.  I'm going to be much more careful this time, do it page by page, make sure everything is correct before I go on to the next page.

I more or less figured out how to do it in the last quarter of the last rewrite.  Simply put the two versions consecutively paragraph by paragraph, and choose the best of both versions. 

What I noticed is that Bren's version was often more active than mine.  Now I try for an active voice -- believe me, I try -- but sometimes without knowing it I slip into a more passive voice.

I will choose a slightly less correct active voice over a technically correct passive voice just about every time.

As you can imagine, this is time consuming and rife for error.  So I just have to do it diligently, page by page. 

Each of these changes makes the manuscript slightly better, so it's worth the effort.

I'm excited to finally be finishing this.