Back in the saddle again

I’ve been having a tad bit of trouble with the website and posting, but I’m back! Been doing things with the kids, particularly school supply shopping. The list seems to get longer each year. But they are supplied and the boy does not have new socks because he argued he didn’t need them, and then I saw today how holey most of his socks are and I expect there will sock shopping in the future. Girlie made out when grandma bought her a bunch of dresses (lovely, hugely expensive dressed on %70 off sale, so that was a good thing). Boy made out with books, since he wasn’t into clothes. Girl got books too, just he got more. And I got myself a copy of Elie Wiesel’s Night and Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants.

Right now I’m working on finishing the copy edits for Shadow City. For those of you who don’t know what that means, let me splain. When you turn a book it, your editor reads it and sends it back with an editorial letter. That letter will include a lot of notes on how to improve it. You revise, and if your editor is happy, it goes to copy edit (if not, repeat step one).

The copy editor goes over the manuscript to correct if for grammar, house style, consistency, and anything else she finds. It then comes back to the editor who also goes through it making a few notes, and then it comes back to the writer. I go through it and can still make changes to my work (this is the last chance for substantive revisions), and to see if I agree with the changes of the CE or E. Sometimes I don’t agree. When I don’t, I STET the change, which puts it back to the original. Now I try not to do that too often, but sometimes the changes just don’t sit right.

Here’s a for instance. It’s more grammatically correct to say “it was as if a piece of every place that had ever existed or been thought of had come to Chadare and cropped roots.” (real sentence from manuscript). Only, given that Max is thinking that, she would never say as if. She’d say like. So even though it’s correct, it’s more important to me that the voice is right, so I STET it.

So that’s what I’m doing today. I do like the process, especially when the copy editor is as good as this one is. Now, back to it . . .

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