Paksworld

Just in case you’re wondering where I am, I’m digging through the computer file line by line, while changing things in accordance with (or similarly to, or in a related way to) Editor’s comments.    I don’t always do *exactly* what Editor advised, because in some cases the exact phrase Editor wanted to change isn’t there now (having been expunged in my own editing earlier) and in other cases I see what I (no doubt arrogantly) think is a better fix to the problem Editor pointed out.   (I’m nearly always agreeing that what Editor points out is indeed something to be pondered and then fixed.)

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Copy Edits are, in the best of times, a nerve-wracking proposition, because CEs, unlike one’s own marvelous, wonderful, thoughtful, brilliant Editor, are professional nitpickers.   If you don’t have a nitpicker mentality yourself (and most storytellers don’t) and if you have a feel for the needs of fiction as opposed to, say, a sociology textbook (and most storytellers do) the more rigid CEs will drive you batty.    Good CEs, as I’ve said before, are pearls beyond price and save your bacon.   Not-so-good CEs become embroiled in trying to rewrite your work to suit their notions, and in the process miss actual mistakes they should catch.

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Pruning, re-ordering, and now gap-filling…chapters have numbers now, and are in what I believe (!) is the correct order, all 33 of them.    Some are much longer than others, and some of the very VERY long ones may be split.    Very short ones may be combined (if same POV and adjacent.)

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….Almost.   Still a few more things to be done before shipping them back to NYC.   I need to rewrite the Dedication, write the Acknowledgments, and run back through the text to catch a couple of things I think I may have done wrong.   Read the rest of this entry »

(Aside–it’s really hard to talk about some of this without spoilers for those who hate spoilers…so if you avsolutely hate spoilers, you might want to skip what’s below…)

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Page proofs are the stage of proofing where you realize what you should have done in revisions (but didn’t), and copy edits (ditto.)    And you can’t make big changes in page proofs.  Well, not without arousing the fury of everyone involved, anyway.

But there are compensations.

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Thank you Google (NOT) for costing me some days of work to fill out your stupid forms to remove my work from your clutches.

It is impossible for a writer to just say “Do not include any of my work in your digitization.”  It’s not even possible to say “Do not include any editions of this work, foreign or domestic.”  No, you have to go through the whole damnfool search & destroy procedure for every single version of every single title and sometimes you hit the wrong button and have to start over.

Also I’m printing out the current draft of Book Two because I need to see it off the screen.   So there will be a hiatus until I’ve dealt with Google (not, alas, with a flaming sword) and gotten my stuff “claimed.”

Those of you waiting for word on being alpha readers, or having already cleared the hurdle and waiting for the whole ms, my apologies.  The wait will last a bit longer.  I’m not spending my Saturday dozing in the sun, I can tell you that!

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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Progress continues on both the revisions of book two and the first-drafting of book three.   In the original Paks books, I wrote parts of the second and third book in parallel almost.   Here I’m finding revising two while writing three to be just as useful–since the things are So Darned Long, working on the previous one helps with continuity.   A lot.

So…what’s happening now?

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