Seven things I learned during the copy editing process...

this MEANS something!

After working through the copy edits of my first novel--A Murder at Rosamund's Gate--I must say, I really learned a few things.

First, copy editors are amazing.  Really.  All this chicken scratch to the left actually means something important to the copy editing process. Delete! Insert! Move up! Move down! and my favorite, "AU," which is short for "Author, what the heck could you possibly mean by this passage?"

I'm used to marking up student papers, but only the first few pages.So I was shocked--and frankly, a bit chagrined--to see that my entire manuscript was marked up from beginning to end, with characters and symbols I didn't recognize. (Thankfully, copy editors don't seem to share my grading philosophy: "Make 'em fix it themselves!") But I'm deeply grateful for her enormous help, and cognizant of how fortunate I am.

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Second, apparently, I don't use commas correctly. Nearly all my commas were eliminated in the editing process. This surprised me.  Purdue's famous Online Writing Laboratory tells us there are 15 rules concerning the use of commas. Having had to memorize these rules as a grad student, I'd been reasonably confident in my ability to render a comma correctly.

Yet, as I've learned, few of these comma rules hold true in fiction writing.  Why such a marked difference in style? I suppose in fiction, the goal is to keep readers breathless, which won't happen if they have to stop at every comma speed bump. So my takeaway?

Commas be damned!

those verbal tics are insidious!

Third, I learned I have some terrible writing tics. Okay, I know the words "But," "However," "Yet," and "Actually" are not as disgusting as the tick pictured here, but they're equally insidious--crawling through my manuscript, clinging to my sentences-- refusing to be combed away under even the closest of scrutiny. Disgusting, I tell you! Disgusting!

And so so SO hard to exterminate! See how many I've used in this post alone? But being aware of them is half the battle, right? 

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I don't edit with scissors anymore!

Fourth, and more significantly,  I also learned that continuity errors are extremely easy to make in the revising process. 

I can't remember if I've talked about this already but let me just say:  Continuity errors are extremely easy to make in the revising process.

(Ha! you see what I did there?) Seriously, I've discovered this problem the hard way. After I chopped out 10,000 words from the beginning and pushed the novel timeline back six months, I made some mistakes. These continuity errors also occurred, I think, when I cut a few minor characters (and reassigned their actions to other characters). Unless a writer is meticulous, which frankly I'm not, it's easy to make mistakes.  

This leads me to the fifth thing I learned: The spreadsheet is my friend!  I'd heard writers talk about their "Bibles" (Nathan Bransford calls his the "Series Bible"), which contain all their character descriptions and quirks, key points, timelines etc. Never mind the term is a complete misnomer, the idea is sound.

Systematically keeping track of stuff in a spreadsheet seems to be a particularly good idea now that I'm working on my second novel.  This might give my Vice-President for Continuity Management (aka my alpha reader) a reprieve as well.

And the sixth, more serious, point:   As much as I think I've scrutinized my manuscript for historical inaccuracies, they seeped in anyway. "The Fire of London," my copy editor politely informed me, "began on September 2, which was a Sunday morning, not a Monday morning." No! this couldn't be true! She must not have understood how the Julian calendar worked. Ten days off the Gregorian calendar, beginning on March 26, blah blah blah I've talked about this before. Bottom line: there was no way I had it wrong.

Confidently, I opened up my trusty historical date calculator, blithely went to September 2, 1666 and --Egads!-- found that the great calamity of London had indeed begun in the wee hours of a Sunday morning.  I know my cheeks were a furious shade of red as I scrambled to reframe one of the most important scenes in my novel. It was hard work I wasn't expecting at this point, but I'm so grateful these errors were caught in the end. 

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shaping a novel--farrier style

 Which leads me to my seventh, most important, most nerve-wracking realization.  The copy editing process means my novel--ten years in the making--is almost ready for the world!  

I'm no longer shaping this malleable object, hammering it, re-firing it, working it just so.  It's almost ready!

But the big question is...Am I?


Murder at Rosamund's Gate

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