Make Up Your Minds Already!

Going over copyedited manuscripts always puts me in a cranky mood. Going over two copyedited manuscripts, one right after the other, when I can hardly think straight thanks to the flu has put me in an ubercranky mood. (So you’ve been warned.)

Now, I’m not one of those writers who see copyeditors as the enemy. I know I do incredibly stupid stuff when I’m writing. When my brain is flying along in creative mode, I write ‘sat’ when I should use ‘set,’ and ‘discrete’ when I should use ‘discreet,’ and a dozen other strange permutations of the English language. A car that is black in one chapter suddenly becomes red. A character named Yates suddenly becomes Yardley. And no matter how many times I go over a manuscript, I still miss those pesky little mistakes. Lots of them. So thank god and publishers for copyeditors.

But there’s nothing like going over two copyedited manuscripts back to back to make you appreciate that this is not an exact science. I feel like screaming, Okay, guys! How about if y’all get together and make up your pedantic little comma-obsessed minds?

Do we say: Now, she knew she was wrong. Or do we say: Now she knew she was wrong.

Because you see, if it’s so important that you guys feel the need to take out a comma—or put it in—then shouldn’t you all agree, especially since you claim to be using the same style guides? Obviously not.

Or here’s another one/Or, here’s another one: What I want to know is, Do I capitalize the D? Or should I say, do I capitalize the d? One copywriter says, no. The other says, Yes. Ghrrr.

And don’t get me started on capitalization. Back in the dark ages when I went to school, if you wrote, “the Secretary of State [as in, Clinton] walked across the room,” the office-as-placeholder-for-the-name was capitalized. But it seems that in the decades since, newspapers discovered that such capitalizations slow down their readers, so they stopped using them. Now (,) everyone (including certain New York publishing houses) is following the newspapers’ lead. The problem with that approach is that if you have a character who is constantly referred to as “the Colonel” or “the General,” then I think it’s less confusing for readers if the old rule is followed. So I have stuck to my guns on this one. But believe me, it’s exhausting. As in parenting, one must pick their battles.

Now (,) you might think I could just jot down some notes about house rules and make the effort to have my next manuscript conform. But apart from the fact that I don’t need one more distraction, these aren’t house rules; these are individual copyeditors’ rules. I looked up previous manuscripts. And you know what? I started sticking those bloody commas in after the “now” and the “once” because a previous copyeditor with the same house insisted they were needed!

So, I give up. Or is that, so I give up? Or should I have said, Or is that, So I give up? Or…

One More Time

The copyedited manuscript for WHY MERMAIDS SING landed on my doorstep yesterday. My first response, as always, was to groan. Here we go again…

I edit my books as I write them, reading them over and over, tweaking and smoothing and constantly reconsidering flow and pacing and story arc. What that means is that by the time I finish a book, I am heartily sick of it—especially the beginning.

I send it off to my editor, and she comes back with suggestions for places where situations need to be clarified or scenes expanded or added. That usually entails a fairly involved rewrite. Then I send it off once more, and in a few months it comes winging back to me AGAIN, this time with a copyeditor’s line edits. Technically I am only required to look at these changes. But this is the last time I can make changes to the manuscript, so I always take advantage of the several months’ distance I now have and do one final editing.

I will see this manuscript one last time, when I am sent the galleys or page proofs. At that point, I could recite the book in my sleep. No matter how hard I try or what tricks I use, I still see what I expect to see on the page, not what’s really there, with the result that I inevitably miss typos. Also, by this point the story feels tired, all its foibles and faults so glaringly obvious that I begin to fear it’s the worst thing I’ve ever written. My family and friends always tell me, “You say that with each book.” I always go, “I know, but with this book it’s true.” I said it about WHEN GODS DIE, and then took all kinds of grief when the book received its three starred reviews. But the fact remains that, somehow, a book never quite lives up to the vision I had of it when I embarked on its journey. I always feel that I failed to make it as good as I could have, as I should have. Someone—I think it was Chap—said the book he has just finished is always his favorite. That would be nice.