Hello, Peter

Hello, Peter!

Sometimes, things just fall right into your hands. This image turned up in my Facebook feed this afternoon. While totally serendipitous, the image fits right in with a major plot line the forthcoming sequel to Urban Mermaid, entitled Syrena.

The wedding and attendant festivities are long over. Penelope and Peter are happily married as Peter adjusts to daily life on Colony Island. There’s just one little thing wrong.

Penelope’s VBFF (Very Best Friend Forever), Amy Seagull has been left with a humongous crush on Peter MacPherson. Amy herself will admit she’s got a harmless “little” crush on Peter. What she won’t admit is that this “little” crush is so big that it blots out the sun. The image accompanying this post could have easily come from Amy’s daydreams.

You can fill in the rest on your own.

Meanwhile

I’ve been taking the 27 chapters (28 if you include the Epilogue) of Syrena out of my Scrivener development environment and moving them into MS Word. Once I move a chapter, the clean-up process begins. As for the cleanup tools, I use MS Word’s built-in correction tools, Grammarly, and ProWritingAid to whip these recalcitrant sentences and paragraphs into some sort of shape. I pray that the overall condition will be an improvement over the way they exist now.

ProWritingAid is used to check for things like Readability, Clichés, Grammar, Overused Words, Style, etc. The reports tell me when I’ve got too many instances of the word, ‘was’ or when the same words and phrases occur to close together. Take it from me, trying to reduce the number of occurrences of ‘was’ is a right pain in the arse.

It takes me one to two days to clean up one chapter. Once all that’s done, I’ll begin my read-through.

And now, it’s time for Hello, Peter!