Paksworld

As I close in on having Book Two ready to send to my agent & editor,  and approaching the six-months-to-release date for Oath of Fealty, I’m seeking some help from you folks…

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I’ve been told I’ll be getting the page proofs early in September.   This is the step that produces ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies, or review copies.)   As of September, we’re only six months from publication…scary thought.

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Yesterday I finally (!) got the copy edits boxed up, taped up, and ready to go when (out of the blue, literally) a storm landed on top of us and for over an hour we had lightning, wind, and (wonderfully) rain.  The power flickered on and off and I declined to go out in it, risking the manuscript, until things settled down, which they finally did.   Then I drove the 20-something miles to the Kinko’s/FedEx place and handed over the box to the nice fellow keeping the doors open until closing time, and drove back home, lighter in heart and pocket both.  (You really don’t want to know what it costs to send over 850 pages of paper ‘overnight’ to New York City from central Texas…)

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When you get the manuscript back from the copy editor (via the publisher) it’s conveniently referred to as “the copy edit” or “the copy edits.”   (Plural for its many pages, I guess.)

You find out at this point that your carefully prepared manuscript has mistakes in it.  You changed something but left one word of the old version of that sentence and did not see it.   Oh, the shame!   You misspelled something–and you a writer of many years, how could you!?  Oh, more shame.

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You know you’re in trouble with Book when you return to it after an absence which it seemed to accept, and it plunges you into a snowstorm, then gallops off, bit in teeth.

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Final days of  my work based on the editor’s notes.   What left for NYC already a few thousand words shorter than it had been, is now almost 3000 words shorter than that…and you would not miss one of them.  Well…maybe a half dozen, but you’d have to have read it before.

How do editors and writers decide what to cut?  Well…think of the classic example: Michelangelo saying that to make a statue all you do is cut away the stone that doesn’t belong.    It’s much the same with words, though figuring out what doesn’t belong is a bit tougher.  After all, if you’re carving a cube, and there’s this triangular lump sticking out one side…that doesn’t belong.   If the “David” had chin-wattles, that wouldn’t belong.  But with a story, especially the first of several that share a story arc…does the bit about the pony and the wildcat belong or not?  (There was no bit about the pony and the wildcat: I just made that up.   I made the whole thing up, but you know what I mean…)

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When I looked at the one editorial request that I just could not make work, and then finally figured it out, I realized it was a perfect example for study.   My editor correctly noted that the emotional high point of a relationship’s end was not at the end…there was an anticlimax scene.

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For the past week, I’ve been working on the revisions my editor sent me (in two parts), and it occurred to me that the process might be interesting to you.  I can’t share exactly what my editor said, because since she and I both know what’s in the book, our communications are just about solid Spoiler.   But with a little judicious tweaking, I think I can give you a taste of the experience of being edited by an excellent editor, though it will reveal some of my weaknesses as a writer.

Editorial comments  fall into three basic categories: the surface-level error…the structural glitch….the foundational/design disaster.  Within quote marks is the original text; the comments outside quote marks are my editors, suitably trimmed to avoid spoilerish revelations.  Square brackets are where I inserted a substitute, non-spoiler, filler.

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