I've mostly recovered from my trip to London.
I made a copy of volume I and omitted all the chapters that haven't reached first draft status yet. I popped it into AutoCrit to see how I'm doing on the finished bits. As a side note, 154,000 out of 240,000 are in completed chapters.
The Generic Descriptions report only showed 5 words it felt were overused. 4 of them had less than 10 usages apiece, so not a big issue. I still have too many usages of the verb "looked" at 194. It's better than my last book! It will be interesting to see how many of the usages of "looked" are in the older writing compared to the newer! (I'm hoping most of them are in the older material!)
The Word Frequency report shows a lot of words that it thinks are overused. Some of them are in the nature of the story, i.e., a story with lots of
battles is going to refer to the flanks, center, thangon, etc. I'll check them out and see what I want to change. This report will take a lot of work to go through.
The Unnecessary Filler Words looks good. It thinks the number of "that" usages is good, I think it's probably still too high at 520. I'm willing to bet most of these usages are in the older writing! (I need to make a list and check off each fix as being in new or old writing.)
The Redundancies report is pretty clean. It catches redundant phrases like "knelt down".
The Cliche report looks good. Some of my usages are literal and not used in the context of a cliche. Example: You spot someone riding on the wagon. "On the wagon" is a cliche for trying to stay sober, but in context, it's clear that the meaning is the person is literally riding on a wagon.
The Showing vs Telling report has revealed many problems. This report highlights when the author tells the reader what someone is thinking rather than showing the reader through the character's actions or words. It's nowhere near as bad as it looked when I first ran it against volume II, so I'm hoping it's mostly in the older writing. Time will tell.
I didn't really use the Adverbs report in Volume II. I may want to go back and revisit it. Volume I shows a lot of problems. Here's the guidance on this report.
https://autocrit.com/editing/support/adverbs/ After all the practice I've gotten editing and rewriting, I understand this one enough to tackle it now. The rewording necessary was just too much before. I checked out a few entries in the report and, right off, could identify a better way to phrase it.
The Repeated Words report shows a lot of entries, but most of them are just 2 uses of a given word in close proximity. I'm not worried about those. A quick glance at a few with larger numbers showed me they were all gathered together in the endnotes. (AutoCrit converts footnotes to endnotes because, being web-based, it doesn't have pages. All those report entries can (mostly) be ignored.)
Took a look at the Pacing and Momentum report. It identified about 240 slow-paced paragraphs. Those are very long or full of complex sentences, vocabulary or some combination of the above. By comparison, a similar-sized work by
Tolkien would have 423 such paragraphs, whereas Brandon Sanderson would have 42. I'm now down to 184, seven of which I couldn't figure out a way to change. (Yet?)
Now I need to go enamel a book cover.
Oh, forgot to mention this. On my last day in London I was able to visit an art school I've dreamed of attending for about 15 years now. It used to be the Prince of Wales' School of Traditional Arts. Now it's the King's Foundation School of Traditional Arts. Our host said I should call first to see if they allowed people to tour the facility and explained that they would stop me at the door and not let me enter. If there's anything I've learned, it's never ask a bureaucrat for permission for anything out of the ordinary. The answer is inevitably "No."
"Nah, I'll just go over there."
"You should call first, they might not let you in."
My wife chimed in, "David's pretty good at that sort of thing..."
So, I ventured out into downtown London. I got an unofficial guided tour of the studios and the student work areas, including their work in progress. I also got to make a two-clay medieval-style floor tile in one of the studios. Plus I made new friends and invited them to visit me in the US and make things in my studio.
Good times!