Since about April 18 I have been editing In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. My time goals for this were: 1) to have the manuscript complete so that I can pitch it to an editor at a writers conference in Oklahoma City on Friday, May 4; and 2) to be ready to self-publish it almost immediately thereafter assuming no one would be interested in the book.

The editing has been tedious. I was trying to improve the timeline. After covering a partial season that the hero spends with the Chicago Cubs, the book traces the events in a complete season. The last time I looked at the book, I felt that I had end-loaded the season—that is, too many event were crowded too late in the season. I also had him not connecting with a girlfriend until some time in late June. I decided that was too late, and many other events were too late, and so I’d better move them earlier in the season.

At the same time, I wanted to be sure that the pitching record of Robo Ronny Thompson made sense relative to where the book was in the season. So if I said, “On June 1, Ronny’s record was 13-1,” I wanted to make sure that was a doable record for a great pitcher.

To accomplish these edits, I first created a Cubs’ season schedule. I took their schedule for this year, 2012, and made a slight adjustment in starting date and in days of the week. I wanted the season to end at a certain date, but the 2012 schedule didn’t end then. So I changed the starting date, and deleted one or two off days to make the schedule work. Then, I created first a spreadsheet table that I later dumped into Word, listing dates and games, including home and away status, and identified when Ronny would pitch.

To this schedule I added all the events in the book, first where I had them, then moving them to the earlier dates to spread things out. I compared the Cubs’ games on the critical days, and discovered sometimes they were playing out of town when they needed to be in Chicago, or vice versa. This required me to either adjust the date or adjust the schedule to make them align. After all these changes, I added the dates from the schedule to the beginning of each scene in the manuscript. This is a temporary thing, and will come out before I either publish or submit the manuscript.

As I said, I found this tedious. Sometimes, when the schedule and events didn’t mesh, I felt that my head was ready to explode, so I shelled out and played mindless computer games when I knew I should be sticking to business. Eventually I came back to the work and figured the schedule out. Now I believe, subject to one more careful reading, that the schedule and the events dovetail perfectly. I cut back on the number of wins Ronny gets during the season, based on my friend Gary’s review (thought not as far back as he suggested). I added quite a bit to the motivation of other characters, hoping they are a little more fleshed-out.

Now I’m down to one slow and careful reading. I plan to do that beginning tonight. I suspect I’ll find a few typos that have escaped my previous readings. I’ll probably find some awkward phrasing that I’ll improve. Possibly I’ll find that the timeline doesn’t work quite as good as I’d like. Possibly I’ll need to change the days of games during the playoffs—oops, spoiler alert. If all goes well, by this time next week I’ll have the final edits on paper and begin typing them. I’ll know whether or not to bother any more with trying to shop it to an editor or agent. And I’ll be a week away from self-publishing it, cover permitting.