Wow. I thought the “last pass” would be quick, catch a few things, and I’d hit the big “publish” button in the cloud. Yeah, sure, you betcha.

I’m up to page 131, and I’ve hacked out about 1500 words by tightening up phrasing, cutting redundancy, and making things clearer. I’m finding numerous corrections that need to be made, beyond simple typos obviously introduced during careless editing of larger errors. My writing has improved significantly between the start and the end of the first pass of major editing with a proper editor point out my thousands of mistakes. Much of my writing is clear enough, but not particularly smooth reading. It’s getting MUCH better. [Later edit: Looking at the very familiar corrections I made in the first 130 pages, I think that somehow a batch of early edits got discarded with a “version control” fail. I.e., as my editor and I mail back and forth, each updated version is saved with a new name and new edit start on that. At some point one of us grabbed an older version. I think. At least, that’s what it looks like, or else editing introduces a LOT of errors.]

Also found out the Latin I used, with Paul’s help, isn’t quite correct, either. New version via a prof at Seattle U is “Consero ut deleam” for Taj’s original motto, and “Liberos transfero qui liberas orbis faciant” for her new one. But we are still not 100% certain of that, either, and checking further.

As slow a reader as I am, it’ll not be done tomorrow, but I’m working pretty full time on it. Soon. Long before Healthcare.Gov is fast and secure.

Consero ut deleam