The thought of printing the whole thing and marking it up seemed too daunting. I didn't want to use all that paper or ink that would be required so I decided to look for another solution.
I have been wanting a way to revise stories away from my keyboard. A tablet seemed like a good way to go. That's when I decided to get an iPad and find an app to edit my stories.
Finding the app was the hard part. My authoring program, Scrivener, syncs with mobile devices but only supports two flavors of text: plain text and RTF. I need RTF to preserve the formatting of the stories. But there is no app that I can find to that edits RTF without showing all the RTF codes.
So I was forced to rely on exporting to Word format and editing my chapters that way. This is less than ideal because when I bring the files back into Scrivener they are converted back to RTF so I have to check the format and apply styles as appropriate.
This is not the workflow I wanted, but it is what I've got to live with for now. The technology just isn't there for RTF files.
But here's the ironic part: once I did all this for the first ten chapters of the novel, I decided I needed to print them out and copy edit them anyway. I even got out my red pencil, which I've not used since I was 10.
So much for the hi-tech solution. I should have known better. Very often low-tech beats hi-tech and that is certain true here. Sort of making me feel like the silly rabbit in the Trix commercials.
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