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Tuesday, March 3, 2020

More Edits:

For my 18th read-through of 'In Another World With 100 Waifus', I'm already discovering lots of errors.  Lyria couldn't have known Rydia's name at the time she mentioned her, so I edited it to a more vague 'someone':

"I thought it might be copyright infringement, since someone had already summoned Bahamut. . ."  Lyria looked sideways and put her two index fingers together in an unstable shifting triangle.

In Japanese, the name Ako is pronounced with a short a, ie, like 'ah'.  Eiko is pronounced with a long a, like 'eight.'  Which means their names are not actually the same.  I've now corrected the total of unique names up one to 787.  There are two Ako's in the book, but only one unique Eiko.

A common mannerism in this book is people finishing their sentence with 'huh?'  Like, "It sure is getting hot these days, huh?"  It follows the Japanese usage of 'ka.'  It's meant to indicate that the speaker of the sentence isn't sure they're right and would like someone else to confirm it for them, and that they're ready to back down if denied.  It's sort of halfway inbetween a declarative and interrogative sentence.  True to form, about half my sentences using 'huh' ended in a period and the other half with a question mark.  It's important to standardize these sorts of things so now they all end with a '?', which is probably the more correct usage of the term anyway.

'said my peace' was corrected to the actual phrase, 'said my piece.'  'Mirajane said' was corrected to 'Mirajane confessed.'  Since she was revealing a shameful secret, it makes little sense for it to be transcribed in a dead monotone like 'said' would imply.  The corrections are manifold.

Together with the new Nekone passage, it seems this 18th edition will see as many important improvements as all the previous ones, and definitely was needed.  The best book ever shouldn't have any technical errors, plot holes, or grammatical snarls.  It should just read perfectly from start to finish.  The editing will continue until morale improves.

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