Tag: proofreading

First Proof Copy!

So last Friday I got Hurricane Baby’s first proof copy, a preliminary PDF of what the book will look like once it’s printed. I was so moved by the care my publishing company is taking with this book! Art on the title pages, beautiful formatting within, just wonderful work so far!

My job was to proofread it yet again. And guys–I found over a hundred and seventy typos. I was appalled at myself. I have been slaving over this manuscript for almost twenty years. And I found commas that were supposed to be periods and periods that were supposed to be commas and double periods and sentences without periods at the end and a very few spelling errors (thank the Lord). Inconceivable that I even got any kind of hearing from anyone I sent it to. The line-editor before this proof had found over three hundred errors.

I was so embarrassed for little ol’ me, sending something so flawed out into the world. I had checked and rechecked and run grammar and spelling checks over and over. I had read it printed out, onscreen, everything.

But I don’t need to just beat myself up–so now I have a plan. I know my eyesight isn’t good and won’t improve any as I get older. I am going to have to magnify up the font to I guess the size where the manuscript will have 500 pages and read line by line at every stage of writing. I don’t want to embarrass myself like that ever again.

So now it is back in the hands of the publisher, and I will wait patiently to see what comes next. I think it will be a final proof copy that I will read again for errors, then in February it will go to print!

SO EXCITING AND GETTING REAL!

Moral of the story: editors are human, and so are you. But taking the time to re-read is never wasted. Other eyes are a big help, too. Let’s be careful out there!

Working Through Setbacks

(I wound up in the hospital ER last Sunday afternoon so that was why I did not post.)

But once I got home, I started back working through my printed manuscript. I am working through my big continuity problem–I had aged Mike and Dinah Seabrook, up to where they were in their early fifties. Guess what I forgot to do?

Age their kids.

I had them with a two-year-old boy and two elementary-age girls.

So now I stepped Mike and Dinah down to in their mid-forties and put all three of the kids in middle school. I remember how stupid I felt once I realized what I had done! I guess I was just very very lucky it wasn’t caught by this publisher’s reader and rejected. (That may have been the trouble all along!)

So I am editing the old-fashioned way–notes in the margins, etc. Once I finish this once-over today, I’ll have plenty of time after I get this health issue straightened out to make the changes in the final manuscript and be done with this stage.

Of course, there’s no telling what’s going to happen once a project editor gets hold of it. I am just trying to get it in the best shape I know how, then take their edits and make it even better!

Next week: talking about cover images! Can’t wait!

Editing Slowly

I am still doing edits to Hurricane Baby, making comma and quotation mark changes throughout the document. I’ve discovered the limits of search-and-replace edits–you can insert as many errors as you fix this way. Now I am down to the reading the entire document again stage of proofreading. Finding all the periods that need to be commas and vice-versa. Correcting the backwards quotation marks throughout. Trying to make sure the right character names are attached to the correct dialogue.

I hope next week to be able to report on the newest revision direction once I get feedback from another beta reader, someone who can tell me what is working on a deeper level than maybe the ones who’ve read it so far. I think the next edit will not involve huge revisions but probably smaller, sentence-level deepening of character motivations and making areas that I feel are clear and understandable even more so.

It’s all important when it comes to getting the attention of an editor–characters, plot, story, grammar, arcs, climaxes, denouments, endings–they all fit together to make or break a book, and what I need to know is what more needs to be done. Hopefully I will find out this week. Wish me well on my journey!

Proofing

So now I am at the nitpicking stage of writing–correcting commas, passive voice, etc. etc. One of my readers said I used passive voice too often. So I did a daring exercise–I ran a total find-and-replace that deleted all instances of the word “HAD”.

It worked.

I’m putting all my sentences into active voice with that one deletion. Often it came out cleanly without needing to change the sentence at all. Other times I had to work out the new tense of the action verb that it preceded. But I will be on the lookout for this in manuscripts from now on.

So in checking all my prose I am correcting grammar and rewriting sentences and doing all those tiny, tiny tasks that make a manuscript look professional and polished. I work on one chapter a day, passing the time until my last reader gets back with me with feedback on the story as a whole.

After I hear back, I will hopefully pull the manuscript apart again and make improvements and make it even better. And I think it can be better. I’m under no illusions that what I’ve done is the best I can do. But I may have done the best I can do for this story now without more input. So I am looking forward to that.

Story Continuity

I have been having fun writing the new installments of Hurricane Baby and cleaning up what I call “continuity problems”. Since I am adapting a huge mass of already-written material to a new purpose, I have to watch for continuity problems.

These could range anywhere from calling a character a wrong name to putting someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, one story had been set between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And I didn’t realize that until I was doing yet another read through and realized that it couldn’t be set during that time because of changes to the timeline occasioned by the new stories I’ve written and other changes to the timeline of the book itself.

How to solve? I’ve started keeping a list that consists of when each event happened and what it was. So if Lelani announced she was pregnant in early January, if she went into preterm labor in the sixth month, the baby would be born in June. If, if, if. Asking a series of If questions make the dominoes of the story fall into place with minimum disruption.