Workarounds
The good news is, I got my edits.
The bad news? I’m using Word to do them.
Is that unfair?
It might be a little bit unfair.
I have, after all, talked about how much I love Microsoft Word. It is my preferred word processor — partly because it’s the one I’ve used most throughout my life, and also because it’s the one most other people use. I use it at work, I used to use it at school and university, and even now I’m passing my novel backwards and forwards to my editor, it makes sense to do that in Word.
And I do genuinely prefer using Word to tools like Scrivener, Campfire, Drabble, any of those tools that have been actually designed for authors. I just think Word is… simpler, in some ways — although I would also argue it’s way more powerful than a lot of people realise.
But. It is certainly not designed specifically for novelists. Especially novelists who will be getting a mass of comments back in the margins from said editor. And certainly not for novelists who like to make themselves to-do lists based on these comments…
Because do you know how hard it is to separate these comments from a Word document??
I mean, in the end, it wasn’t that hard. I Googled it, and I think I was still at the bottom of the first page of results when I figured out how to do it. But the way to do it was… deeply unintuitive.
In case this is something you’d ever like to do, by the way, here is how I did it:
I saved my Word document to my desktop as a webpage.
I’ll let that sink in. It was the 2nd option presented, after “going through each comment one by one and copying them manually to another document”, which I didn’t feel like doing, honestly. The benefits of turning my document into a webpage were as follows:
It put all the comments at the bottom of the page in a list, a bit like footnotes, so I could easily copy them all out and into a new document.
It also auto-numbered them, including the initials of the person who made the comment, so for my editor, they showed up as KL1, KL2, KL3, etc. I can see that this would be helpful if multiple people were also working on a document.
In the end, it took all of 3 minutes, not including looking up the How-To in the first place — but I can’t help thinking that I maybe shouldn’t have had to do all of that to achieve something that SURELY loads of people need to do fairly regularly.
Anyway, it’s served its purpose.
I’ve grouped comments about the same thing together, and formed both a plan and a timeline in which to work on all my bits.
Wish me luck!