{"id":205,"date":"2016-08-02T12:33:30","date_gmt":"2016-08-02T17:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/?p=205"},"modified":"2016-08-02T18:44:59","modified_gmt":"2016-08-02T23:44:59","slug":"copy-edits-take-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/2016\/08\/02\/copy-edits-take-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Copy Edits, Take 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

For me, working on copy edits means having all the following at hand (or just down the hall):\u00a0 dictionary, Chicago Manual of Style<\/em>, directions and notes from publisher (I manage to screw up at least once anyway, but I try not to),\u00a0 the mechanical pencil (because it stays sharp) and a spare,\u00a0 and of course layout space on the kitchen table, so I can arrange three stacks–the unread, the stack I’m working on (100 pages at a time), and the stack of “first round done” pages.\u00a0 Reserve dictionaries and the online references are also around, but not on the kitchen table.<\/p>\n

Hands washed, no food or drink on the table, clean dishtowels ready to lay over the “open” pages any time I get up and at night.<\/p>\n

That’s ideal.\u00a0 For me.\u00a0\u00a0 Then there’s what happens while you’re making plans.\u00a0 Saturday, first day, went well.\u00a0 200 pages got their first run-through; I made notes for questions to Editor (not many) and went to bed not too late.\u00a0 Woke up at 4 am hot and sweaty and thought “Am I coming down with something?”\u00a0 No, the AC was giving up.\u00a0\u00a0 This is not a good thing to have happen on the margin of August in Central Texas, with predictions topping 100F (and heat indices higher) for the next week.\u00a0 Or so.<\/p>\n

Obviously–as this was the weekend with no actual repair available until at least Monday, probably later–Plan B needed to be instituted.\u00a0 Husband & son went off to church.\u00a0 I went to the other house (where son stays on weekends, where Houseguest stayed in late June), and turned on the AC there, which is used only when we have guests (son doesn’t use AC in his apartment in the city, and could use it here but usually doesn’t.\u00a0 Ah, youth. When I was his age, I didn’t use AC in hot weather either.\u00a0 70+ is not early 30s.\u00a0 Worked in this house (as it got steadily hotter) until the other one was cool enough, then started lugging the necessities (other than computer, which is embedded, so to speak, in this room) over there.<\/p>\n

The books.\u00a0 The 710 pages of ms plus publisher notes & directions.\u00a0\u00a0 The reference books.\u00a0\u00a0 A few necessities so I could stay over there, maximizing the work time (and minimizing the “sweating too much to touch the papers without leaving spots” time.)<\/p>\n

Then it’s the page by page look at every mark the CE made (many of them are markups for Production) and considering those that are actual editing marks (aimed at what I wrote.)\u00a0 I’m also looking for the problems I didn’t see earlier (caught a big one.)\u00a0\u00a0 Like most fiction writers (not sure about nonfiction writers) I have a love\/less-love relationship with CEs.\u00a0\u00a0 When they find the typo, I love ’em.\u00a0 When they find that a whole phrase (without which the sentence doesn’t make sense) is missing, I love ’em.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When they point out that eleven people on one page turned into ten people on the next, I love ’em.\u00a0 When they mess with the rhythm of my sentences…not so much.\u00a0 When they confuse an order or an explanation with a question and stick ? on the end, not so much.\u00a0\u00a0 When they are inconsistent themselves in applying one of their more arcane rules, not so much becomes almost not at all.<\/p>\n

I try to start with the attitude that if they’re bothered, maybe readers would be.\u00a0\u00a0 Although SF readers, and military SF readers in particular, are bothered by things that do not upset CEs, and not bothered (usually) by “correct” grammar that is disappearing rapidly from both spoken and written material.\u00a0 (“Whom”–and that’s a word I like–is one example of a rapidly disappearing word in American English.) \u00a0 I’ve had both good and less good copy editors (and I’m sure they feel the same way about writers!)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What is “good?”\u00a0 For me, someone whose choices make sense, in light of the references I use.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m not a perfect writer (no one is!)\u00a0 and am generally amenable to informed guidance…if the copy editor understands what kind of book it is.\u00a0\u00a0 What kind of characters are speaking (and thus why they may habitually use nonstandard or at least imperfect grammar.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, CEs usually work on more than one kind of book, and they’re working on tight deadlines, too, just as I am, so they don’t have time for a leisurely read through and contemplation of my (or another writer’s) full intent.\u00a0 So I’m lenient, or try to be.\u00a0\u00a0 I try to understand why they marked a word or punctuation mark or passage and see if their correction is something I can accept.<\/p>\n

Sometimes it is.\u00a0 Sometimes I agree that there was a problem, but don’t like their way of fixing the problem.\u00a0 Sometimes I don’t think there’s a problem even after reading the entire page (and maybe another) out loud, and silently, several times.\u00a0\u00a0 If it’s their fix I don’t like,\u00a0 I draw a line through theirs and fix it my way.\u00a0\u00a0 If I don’t think there’s a problem, I draw a line through their line and STET the whole thing.\u00a0 But I give them the careful reading I want them to give me, including surrounding text.\u00a0 This often produces side benefits, like finding out that I had conflated two cities on two different continents, and had characters traveling to one and arriving at the other (on the wrong continent.)\u00a0 Careful reading through, many times…eyes on the page…makes books better.\u00a0 (How I missed the one where apparently I fell asleep and landed an elbow on the keyboard…have no idea.\u00a0 Glad the CE spotted it.\u00a0 It did stick out.\u00a0\u00a0 Unless something glitched in the emailing of it.)<\/p>\n

So now I’m in Phase 2 of the process…going back over the pages again, this time back to front, to check for anything I missed in the first round, and considering the pages turned sideways, whose more complex problems I now have to work on.\u00a0\u00a0 Two of three of these may require referring to Editor, this time, but perhaps,\u00a0 with computer access full time now, I can solve them myself.\u00a0\u00a0 Compared to some in the past, this has been an easy set of copy edits (aside from the burnt-out part in the AC.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For me, working on copy edits means having all the following at hand (or just down the hall):\u00a0 dictionary, Chicago Manual of Style, directions and notes from publisher (I manage to screw up at least once anyway, but I try not to),\u00a0 the mechanical pencil (because it stays sharp) and a spare,\u00a0 and of course Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,10],"tags":[8,27,7],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copy-edits","category-the-writing-life","tag-cold-welcome","tag-technical-bits","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions\/207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}