That Barely Hurt A Bit

We have a large pile of marked-up pages from taking the Music Novel through our critique group, and we mentioned recently that the process of digesting all that input is something we find cumbersome. Happily, it turned out that a fairly simple workflow adjustment made things go very smoothly for us this time, so all of that valuable input is now added to our Scrivener project as comments. We’ve even made significant headway on addressing it.

What was this radical innovation in critique-copy processing? We ran it in parallel rather than in series. Instead of picking up a single review copy and going all the way through it, then doing that with the next one on the pile, and so on, we grabbed all the copies of a chapter and spread them on the ottoman at once (where we had room to turn all their pages — the auxiliary writing cave has a big ottoman). Not only was it more efficient mechanically, but it allowed us to compare the notes immediately when different readers commented about the same thing.

If, on some future occasion, we devise a more interesting solution to this issue you’ll certainly read about it here. But for now, simple is best.