Wondering What's Happened to the Novel?

In case you are wondering what happened to the novel we were crying from the rooftops about, it's well on its course. We have received some encouraging feedback from a Parsi poet friend of ours, which means he didn't mind our calling his community "Parisi." They being a very inclusive community, one of the best we have known in India. We have been to so many homes of Parsis we have known over the years and we like their openness and their propensity to laugh at themselves.

That being so, we are now in the stage of sitting back and reading the novel from a readers point of view, or, a neutral point of view as Wikipedia would like to have it. We forget we are the author (which is difficult) and we also look at the prose critically to see if it hangs together, by the tether, whatever. Several inconsistencies and repetitions have come to the fore, among them several that break the rule of "never repeat a word in the same sentence or para" which in reality is superfluous. We do a lot of that and they have to be - painfully - edited.

Then the novel goes for the final sub-editing. That should be easy as we aren't going to re-write anything, just doing line editing, as we used to do when we were sub-editor. A sub-editor doesn't think. He/she just tweaks language to an acceptable state without introducing any new ideas or concepts. Or, at least, that's what sub-editors used to do in the good old days, we being an oldy and all.

So what's our target, 2014? Don't know. We no longer work according to target. That was in the corporate days we had targets and timelines. No longer. Ciao to all that!  See you around.