At long last, LIQUID FIRE is on its way to production at Bell Bridge Books!
This was a particularly difficult copyedit – not because the copyeditor was demanding anything particularly weird, but because a misunderstanding on the style guide led to an edit with five thousand annotations.
At one point working with the PDF, I was zooming in the text 200% to try to see what the copyeditors did, and even when what they were suggesting was clear, the number of edits caused everything to jump around crazily.
Finally I had to ask Bell Bridge to send me a .DOC file, so I could use Microsoft Word’s superior tools. I was quickly able to identify 2,500 of the edits as being completely correctable – ellipses and spellings and such – and started a style guide.
Many of the rest were simple things like the Oxford comma, which we had a style change on. Counting these took us down to about a thousand edits.
Most of those thousand were minor changes which I readily accepted. The copyeditors had different suggestions than me on things like the use of the colon, which I often accepted, and paragraph breaks, which I generally did not.
But there was one particular thing – a replacement of the colon with the dash in sentences that already had the dash, which irked me intuitively, and which also turned out to violate the very Chicago Manual of Style rule the CE was citing.
Because we’d gone back and forth on this so much, what I finally sent back to Bell Bridge was a document with 200 tracked changes – mostly, the copyeditor’s comments with extensive responses from me on what CMOS rules I was citing.
(We also had changes to Cinnamon Frost’s broken English, contributed by the linguist Keiko O’Leary who helped me develop Cinnamon’s dialect; but these were largely nonproblematic).
Debra and the copyeditors accepted these with few changes – but still sent a document back with over forty comments. At this point, even if I didn’t agree with them, I took the changes very seriously.
A lot of their remaining suggestions violated some of the “rules” that I write by. But those are not hard and fast rules – and the fact that Debra critiqued them told me that, regardless of my “rules”, the particular text at hand simply wasn’t doing the job.
I accepted most of these comments. I rejected a small handful of others. And in a few cases, I took Debra’s suggestions and solved them a different way, with a larger rewrite which just made the whole problem she saw just go away.
The manuscript I sent back to them had 30 comments or changes. By my count, it was close to the 130th distinct numbered version of the LIQUID FIRE manuscript that I’ve worked on.
Debra accepted it and sent it on to production on Thursday.
That was a good day.
Now on to the edit of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE!
-the Centaur
