She messed with my commas. MY commas!
She messed with a lot of other stuff, too. I think she went through three red pens, marking errors and making suggestions and criticisms. I can't say much about her suggestions without giving away some of the plot ... and I don't want anyone knowing how dumb I am sometimes. I've read through her comments, read her cover letter summary five times, and have dried my tears. I did not throw the manuscript across the room, despite the temptation.
So what's the next step? Do nothing. I step back for a few days, read a good novel, walk the dog, mow the grass ... and think about how to proceed. But not too much. Then I'll make a pass through the manuscript and make the obvious changes - misspells, word usage, sentence structure, etc. This is done from the back of the book working forwards, since the edits are on a hard copy. I found out the hard way that if you start at the beginning, Microsoft Word renumbers as you go and soon you're out of sync with the hard copy and, well, lost.
After fixing the little stuff, I take a knife to the story and make some big cuts. First, the prologue has to go - twelve pages. Then a big section that really has little to do with the story, but is mostly just for fun - twenty pages. That takes out 7,000 words in two quick hits.
Then the hard part. Cleaning up language and action. Making it believable. Check the facts. Make the dialogue realistic, though I'm pretty good at that - Dawn didn't mention any problems there. Of course, she found plenty of other stuff. Make the characters deeper...
Then, after a few weeks, it will be ready for the proofreaders for a final check. A few weeks more while they read and I read it again aloud to my wife, the Proofreader in Chief. Then make the final fixes. Then, we publish.
I still hate waiting.
1 comments:
I can't wait for your next book!!!
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