#author misc

[sosthemortalcoil]

can we still send asks? or would you prefer we dont?

If you have an ask, please do send it in! I do read them (and no matter the content, the fact people still send things always gives me a burst of motivation and feels), even though I haven’t sat down to reply to any in a while. Work has been exhausting and with everything else going on I’m afraid I haven’t been as productive as I would like. 

To that end, a fun(?) fact about my writing process. I write a scene, but I loathe fluffing word count (this is a me thing; I understand for many people it’s easier to copy-paste and change a little bit for different variations of a scene). So after writing, I will go through variations and try to cut down on any repetitions that might go towards the word count without representing new information.

Here’s an example.

Scene before editing (for this example; the real unedited scene had more tiny discrepancies that didn’t add any value to the differences. I’ve already pared the scenes down so I tried to recreate one for the purpose of explaining.)

Word count: 407

Scene after editing:

Word count: 282

That’s 125 words of repetition, i.e. padding. 30.7% This mostly happens around choices rather than branches. Because I want to give as accurate a word count as possible, one that actually gives you an idea of how much content is unique, I spend a pass doing this.