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…of copy edits corrected. There are only (!) 39 chapters, but more words in the last nineteen than in the first twenty.
I quit after finishing chapter 20, a few minutes ago. Tired. Tired of all the little red marks and having to check every single one. Copy-editing is a tough job for the copy-editor, but the CE’s job is one of marking anything that strikes him or her as off.
The writer’s job is to look at every mark (and everything between and around the marks) and decide if the CE is right…will the change make that phrase, that sentence, that paragraph, that page, that chapter better? Or worse? Or is the change neutral, in terms of what the writer wants to accomplish. One CE may decide that in a fantasy full of royalty, all the titles should be capitalized all the time. Another CE may decide that no title should be capitalized.
This writer has chosen a middle route (chose it back in the first book in the whole story-universe) and is stuck with it for continuity’s sake (I still like most of the choices made then.) But the CE hasn’t read all the books. Only continuity within the book matters to the CE.
So the writer–this writer, not to be coy about it–must look at every word the CE has touched and fix it if the CE has capitalized or un-capitalized it. CEs also vary in their grasp of punctuation within dialogue. Some like to mess with it a lot. If they do, the writer is nose-down on the page, checking every single punctuation choice (the CE’s and the writer’s.)
I accept changes that don’t offend my ear or damage the book. I welcome corrections of actual errors (being a not-perfect-yet writer.) I tolerate some ho-hums (neutral in effect, from my POV.) But I am determined not to let a CE turn tight, suspenseful passages into bland, prosaic, flat passages.
Even the best of all possible CEs will do something that makes a writer’s nostrils flare and lip curl. CEs drag writers back through their stories in detail–it feels like being too close to the TV screen. The best of all possible CEs also save writers from their own errors–they catch the “echo,” the character who just died reappearing to deliver lunch, the car that was blue when you got into it and is gray when you get out, and so forth.
Nineteen chapters to go. Sigh. Huff. Puff. Tomorrow, not tonight.
I wish i could say that 20 chapters of III were in the file.
Comment by Chuck — May 8, 2010 @ 8:59 pm
I’m sure this varies also from publisher to publisher, but are the CEs usually in-house employees, or contract employees? That is, in your current situation. You’ve referred elsewhere to encountering incompatible CEs in the past, completely wrong for the book. Is there any chance that from volume to volume of a series the same CE will be used? I’d think the familiarity with what the rules were for the previous volume might outweigh the advantage of completely new eyes for the successive volumes. In my own work as a technical editor in the aerospace industry, it is sometimes a tossup between being misled by familiarity and misled by infamiliarity with a subject or engineer’s writing style.
Comment by Genko — May 10, 2010 @ 9:44 am
Hundreds of years ago, when I was a typesetter, I got my oar in there too — if we were keyboarding (this was before the days where keystrokes were easily captured), we were also reading, and if we found something off, we would put an Editorial Query sticky note on it. It would then go back to the editor and thence to the author (if needed). One of my favorite back-and-forths was when a typesetter noted ” ‘rather unique’ is rather impossible.” The typesetter was, of course, accurate, but when we got the galleys back, the editor said “the author rather likes it,” and so it stood that way.
As typesetters, we automatically fixed obvious spelling and punctuation errors. If there was any doubt, though, we would put an EdQ sticky note on it. Ditto for grammatical issues. It was part of our effort to make sure we were putting out a good product, and assisting in whatever way we could in the process.
When we got galleys back, we were also dealing with AAs (author alterations) and PEs (printer errors). I suppose our EdQs were also a way of trying to make it clear that if this was to change it wasn’t our fault. Because we could charge the customer for AAs, but not for PEs. I don’t know whether any of this even applies these days when little or none of the keyboarding is done as part of the printing process.
And, yes, it’s picky and tedious. But I can tell when I read a book where this hasn’t been done, or done carelessly. I can get past it to some extent, but it still bugs me. A remnant of the professionalism of the past.
Comment by elizabeth — May 10, 2010 @ 12:28 pm
Chuck: I believe CEs are now nearly always contract employees. And (what I hear from former CEs) not well-paid. If OATH’s CE had not alienated the publisher, I would almost certainly have the same one and things would have gone more smoothly. However, sometimes a CE is committed to another project before a series book is offered–and in that case another CE is picked for it. The “right” CE may not be available.
Genko: As you’re well aware, copy editing an SF or fantasy book is trickier than, say, a contemporary novel–which itself is harder than a contemporary not-too-technical nonfiction–because the CE is faced with terminology and names and other stuff that he or she can’t just look up in the dictionary. Historical novels can create the same problem, if the CE knows nothing about that period of history.
What I’ve found, over the course of many books, is that some CEs have a knack for recognizing when something is doing its job and when it isn’t. Others lack the knack, or perhaps the experience with a broad selection of fiction styles. Another writer I know asked if the CE (who had gone wild with the red pencil) had never read any English (as opposed to American) fiction, and found that the CE had not. The idea that a writer might use legitimate (but less common) constructions, words, punctuation, etc. to create the atmosphere of a different world was alien to that CE. And to some others.
The problem for the writer is that if you’ve been handed one of these CEs, and a ms. with red marks all over it, once you start stetting furiously (and fury does come into it!) you’re apt to stet those changes the CE made correctly. I’ve never seen a ms. on which all the marks were wrong. Lots of them, maybe, not never all. The stopped clock is right twice a day.