So as I work my way through Bifrost’s (almost) 3rd Draft, I’m finding it incresingly frustrating to have the version I’m working on be a hard copy.

Yes – I do love the look of my pink, purple and blue sparkly editing pens, but the fact that I’m sitting here on a bus, unable to edit because the 550-odd-A4-page monolith that is Bifrost* is too unwieldy to carry around is starting to become quite upsetting.

It became so upsetting recently that I decided “Fuck it, I’m gonna edit the soft copy from which I printed the monolith”. So I did.

Then I tried to print and integrate the edited portions back into the hard copy.

Oh.

Fuck.

Now the pages are all messed up.

So editing the soft copy is out. I get it. Thanks again, Captain Hindsight.

But what do I do? Sure, I’ve been getting A LOT more work done on my blog (perhaps you’ve noticed?) because the times I spent actually WRITING Bifrost were mostly spent in bars, on busses, in bars, on planes, in airports and in bars at airports.

I’ve been hesitant to take out smaller portions of my manuscript in order to edit them on the run because I worry that I’ll damage the pages so much I can no longer read them (I have form with the utilities bills I pay when on the bus) and also that I’ll lose bits or not successfully integrate the smaller portions back into the monolith.

But I think I have to get past this.

I think what I’m going to do is take out whole chapters. Perhaps two per bus day. So…maybe one chapter per hour of travel time. And if I have a suitcase (like I do when I fly), I’ll take the whole monolith, then re-integrate at the hotel or wherever I’m staying once I arrive.

This should allow my defective mathematical brain to be able to re-integrate the parts more easily because they’re whole chapters and I’ll just have to be more careful with the chapters than I am with our utilities bills (I think at a basic level I just don’t like utilities bills).

Hopefully this will allow me to get more work done on editing Bifrost and wishfully, I’ll still be able to get as much work done on this blog!

— IEK

*Yes, I know it’s 2 books. In fact I’m kind of vibed that it’s 2 books.