Back-Editing Book 1 again: Chapter 9 under slight renovation

Hi, everybody. Since Book 2 chapter 4 got put up yesterday, I decided to get back to something I was working on before I even split my story in two: back-editing.

For those of you that are new and haven't been reading my old blog posts, I'll catch you up to speed. I've improved a great deal since I started writing, and I got a new proofreader, Setokaiva. When he came on board, he went over the chapters I already had and offered a list of corrections. It was... a very long list. Now since I cross-post this story to four different sites, I hesitated making these corrections because of the raw tedium of it. I put it off for like year, no joke.

But eventually, I decided to tackle this large task, and prior to posting Book 1's original chapter 15, I had just completed going through Book 1 chapter 8, "Survival". It was taking so long that I decided to put the rest of the back-editing on hold, and just announce whenever I'm doing it again.

Now, when I talk about back-editing and corrections, I mean things like:

1. Missing commas (There are a lot of those)
2. Missing hyphens
3. Mis-capitalized words
4. Words that should be capitalized
5. Using dashes instead of em-dashes (because I didn't know the difference at the time)
6. Misspellings
7. Misspelled words hidden as other, legitimate words (Ninja typos, I call them, because they're so very sneaky)
8. Tense problems
9. Paragraphs that can be combined (I try to avoid making paragraphs too large, but I think I've gone too far in the other direction)
10. Sentences that, upon further inspection, seem clunky and have excess words.

To my new readers, I want to stress something about point number ten: Nothing of importance will be lost when I re-write these sentences. I working on making them read better and smoother. And if you think that sounds a little vague, I'll give you guys a prime example of the sorts of things I've done thus far, as copied from my notes (because you need notes for this sort of thing). So here's a look behind the scenes of what goes on when I back-edit (or just plain edit, because I was doing this same process when writing Book 2 chapter 4).

Book 1, Chapter 8 "Survival"

Original Version
She hunted through the cabinets for a box of cereal to serve as her breakfast, letting out another enormous yawn as she finally found it.

Current version
She hunted through the cabinets for a box of cereal, letting out another enormous yawn as she finally found it.

I took out the underlined section there for two reasons. One, it sounded a little clunky when you read it out loud, and second, the underlined section was totally unnecessary. The scene already established it was morning, and Sunset was looking for cereal. What else is that going to be, lunch? A mistake on my part, to be sure, but one I took out. And in doing so, I cut down the word count by five words in one go.

Or take this one:

Original version
His first response was to try and grab her, but Sunset had simply fled onto the street. Thanks to a healthy set of lungs, she drew the attention of a small crowd of adults, making sure it included several maternal-looking women and some very burly men. By following that up with some decent acting, she convinced them that her fence was trying to kidnap her. 
 
She'd slipped away in the chaos that followed. When she'd found him later, his face looked like one giant bruise, not to mention the rest of him. As she'd stared down at him from atop a stack of old boxes like a small queen on a throne, she told the battered crook that her pictures were hidden in a place he'd never find, and that if he ever tried anything again, they'd go right to the authorities.

Current version
His first response was to try and grab her, but Sunset had simply fled onto the street. Thanks to a healthy set of lungs, she drew the attention of a small crowd of adults, making sure it included several maternal-looking women and some very burly men. With some decent acting, she convinced them that her fence was trying to kidnap her, and slipped away in the chaos that followed.
 
When she'd found him later, his face looked like a giant bruise. Staring down at him from atop a stack of old boxes like a small queen on a throne, she told the battered crook that her pictures were hidden in a place he'd never find, and that if he ever tried anything again, they'd go right to the authorities.

Essentially, it's the same passage, but thirteen words shorter, and reads smoother.

Or even just this:

Original version
Sunset supposed that made sense. In fact, now that she thought about it, Sunny hadn't asked about food when Sunset had gotten her own meager dinner last night. The fire-haired teen had been too wrapped up in homework to think of asking. At least it would make things easier on groceries in the near future.

Current version
Sunset supposed that made sense. In fact, now that she thought about it, Sunny hadn't asked about food when Sunset had gotten her own meager dinner last night. She’d been too wrapped up in homework to even think of asking. But at least it would make things easier on groceries in the near future.

A one word reduction.

Now to be fair, reductions as large as that second example were outliers. While I did reduce a different passage by twelve words, other parts were reduced by seven, four, two, or even just one, as in the third example. And while a bit here and there doesn't seem like much, over the course of a chapter it can add up to a not insignificant amount. When I was finished, I reduced chapter 8's total word count by at least thirty words.

So, yeah, that's what I do, and that's what I'll be doing for chapter 9. So if you see a fluctuation in the word count, don't panic. You also aren't obligated to re-read the chapter because of this, either. I know time's precious. I'm just doing this because I want to, and because now seems like a good time to get back to it.

So with that, onto the work. The very long work.

A Tale of Two Suns, Book 1
Total number of corrections (Chapters 1-8): 452