Colony Update: Status, Pricing, Stats · 10:47pm Oct 15th, 2016
All right guys, here's the status report so far. First of all: The Current Status of the Manuscript.
Colony is going into Copy-Edit phase today. This is the point where I sit down and covert the word document I had been working with into an ebook compatible format for the first time! Woo! The purpose of this phase is to go over it again looking for both formatting mistakes and any lingering errors that made it through the Beta stage ... though my checks thus far show that to be a very small number.
Oh, and because I can, here are some fun stats that accrued during the beta:
Colony contained 10,003 apostrophes. Each one of these had to be individually checked. 4 were accidental uses in place of a quote. Colony now contains 9,999 apostrophes (yup, exactly that number).
Colony also had 754 uses of an ellipsis (the "..." you see in places), as well as six cases of that ellipsis not being such but instead being three period. Those have all been fixed. There were also two cases of there being four periods, and a small scattering of doubled punctuation (comma-period, period-comma, etc). There were six instances of two spaces back to back. One case of an improperly placed quotation sign.
If any of that sounds incredibly tedious to find and fix: It was. That's the editing process for you.
Here are some other Colony statistics for the curious:
333,349 words, or 1.836 million characters including spaces. 1.5 million without spaces.
8,069 paragraphs.
42 chapters in total.
Anyway, onto other news, such as The Status of the Cover!
You can read the rest of this post at Unusual Things
The manuscript used to contain 10,003 apostrophes, the same number as the number of karma points required to buy a legendary weapon precursor collection in Guild Wars 2, an MMORPG. The story has been improved by removing four of them, cutting the number to 9,999. Four is one more than three. 9,999 is also the damage cap for a single attack in Final Fantasy VI, which is a JRPG.
This can only mean one thing: Half-Life 3 deconfirmed, as Gabe Newell scraps it to throw all his resources behind a video game adaptation of Colony.
/Foilhat