Another month? Where’s the time gone? Okay, I know. Assignments on uni, hockey championship…

Anyway, my writing progress. There’s definitely some, even if it might be harder to see. I came to the realization that my progress reached the point where I can’t move on without external feedback. In other words, the beta stage is coming soon. This fact affects my latest progress.

I’ve made another pass focused on fixing things earlier, and knowing that I am not likely to do massive rewrites until I actually offer my story for beta reading and (hopefully) get some feedback, I decided to do some grammar polish. So, I installed Grammarly to give it a try. I let it churn my latest draft (which I number 0.5.3 for my own purpose) and it found whopping 3000-ish mistakes. Some of them were false alerts mostly related to names. Others were not-so-big like Oxford comma (which, in most cases, would not lead to confusion). Inconsistency when using some EN-US and some EN-UK versions of words made another maybe 300+ alerts.

Grammarly at 65% done

Still, most of them were easily fixed just by adding the missing comma, fixing the spelling or just looking at the suggestion and thinking whether the way I wrote the sentence says what I wanted to say. It also helped me to consolidate capitalization in some cases. The best example is the War Council, which I used in pretty much any combination of capitalized and uncapitalized option.

Yet, even Grammarly is not totally foolproof. Sometimes, it was causing weird false alerts when it only took half of a word into account and suggested finishing it, even though the letters were there. It also struggled with possessive forms of custom character names, more so if the name itself contained an apostrophe.

My current plan is to leave it be for now (and take care of exams meanwhile), then do one more pass with Grammarly, possibly do the last self-proofread and then finally start beta version, delayed almost a year compared to my original plan.

So, for my June update, I hope to have a beta version of the story’s description ready and maybe I will share it here. Maybe, because the coming beta stage is inducing more ‘stage fright’ than I’d expect.