Showing posts with label editing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label editing. Show all posts
Friday, March 15, 2013
Maybe not Greater, but Better-er
Making copy editing corrections is not the most glamorous
job in the world. In fact, I think it’s one of the most humiliating things out
there.
I am a writer. I create WORLDS! I invent THINGS! I describe
the INDESCRIBABLE!
But I can’t spell worth shit.
And I’m bat blind to the dumbest mistakes.
Yes, going through the many, many, many pages of basic copy
editing corrections I paid for. It’s the second book of the Caribbean Spell Series, Red Sean’s Revenge, and it’s a bigger
book. I think it’s even more exciting and I do some DASTARDLY things to my
heroine. I’m NASTY.
But geez, I’m an idiot.
Okay, firstly, I capitalized every usage of the title governor, commodore, captain, ma’am, lady, m’lady
and more I’m sure I just haven’t found yet.
Secondly, I had changed the hero’s name. From Jack to Jake.
Which meant that manjack became manjake. Jackson became Jakeson. (I changed that one to Jacob.)
I also kept dropping the last ‘a’ from Miranda’s name.
How about this one. “…held his tongue, determined to wait out
this out.”
(Should be “…held his tongue, determined to wait this out.”)
Or, “…convinced herself not to mad.”
(“…convinced herself not to be mad.”)
Yes, I swear, I was drunk. It’s disheartening to realize how
many STUPID mistakes I’ve made. And I’ve read my own words over a dozen times.
This story? At least that many times, if not more. (I like to read my own
stories, I wrote this a while ago…) And I never saw these things. It’s
mortifying.
And it’s a real illustration of why, if you self-publish,
you need to either pay for someone to look your stuff over with a red pen or
screw your headband on tight and do it yourself. Have it read to you, read it
yourself… Any of these would work. I believe.
I’m learning how to be humble this week. Yes, there were things
like this in the first book, but not this bad. Not this many. I don’t trust
myself to find these things. My eyes are tired, I know the story, my reading speedometer
is stuck on sprint car speed…
I’m still humiliated.
But I am gratified to know all of this is being caught. None
of my readers, no matter how many or how few, won’t see how riddled with
mistakes – typos, misspeaking, bad grammar – and, evidently, I don’t know how
to use commas correctly.
Sigh.
The next book, I’m paying my beta copy editor a bonus.
I’m getting better, but I’m not great… I’ve seen some bad
mistakes in ebooks the big 5 publishers put out. It’s a bit of a relief. I’m
not the only idiot out there.
What tricks do you
use to clean up your copy? What do you see when you read that drives you
bonkers? Any examples of things you’ve caught in your stories that you want to
share?
Friday, February 1, 2013
Editing Fool
Edits. Ah,
my weeks from a very special sort of hell. I actually threatened my editor with
the Kraken on Facebook. She laughed and said they were good friends. I cursed
her with Cthulhu, she grinned and I saw her green teeth, realized she was one
of the chosen.
It wasn’t
fair. I warned her, as I addressed the 242 comments on the side of my 15.5k
story (that is over 5 comments per page!) “I’m gonna end up adding a ton of
words!”
“Add more
words. More words are good!”
(Direct
contradiction of my first editor who, when I added 5k words to an 80k story,
said, “Good! Don’t ever do that again.”)
What did
Zee, the new editor, want? Well, she wanted more details. She wanted great
depth and sensuality, she wanted more backstory and development of the myth,
she wanted me to stop having body parts move and behave independently of the
characters. (It is a bit on the horror side but not so much that I could get
away with hands wandering like Thing in the Addams Family.) (One day I’m gonna
write a book like that, just so I can write all the disembodied body parts I
want.) (So, there!)
She wanted,
she wanted, she wanted!
I? I didn’t
want. She hit me with all these wants at a time when I could barely string
together two emotions let alone stir any libido into the mixture. I was silent
and unable to muster up any enthusiasm at all.
But I had
to. I got an extra week and with no choice before me…I opened the doc and dove
in.
And wanted
to kill her over and over and over and over and over.
I ended up
adding 3.5k to the short story. Torturous, terrible, words of blasphemous
belief and a sensuality that only an elder god could appreciate.
Lorelei’s
Song is all about the last siren on earth, who knew she’s different but didn’t
realize how different. She is into heavy BDSM, rich as Midas, and bored.
Terribly bored. (It is really hard to write a bored character as anything but
boring. I may never create a bored character again. If I do, shoot me.) (I mean
she wasn’t a boring woman, but she was bored. Big difference.) She goes to a
Steampunk convention and meets two guys. Who happen to be descendants of the
unholiest of all elder gods, the terrible awesome Cthulhu. These guys can shift
into tentacle sea monsters. They are on
the edge of desperation. Need to mate, need to let the monster inside get
sexy.
The three
meet and it might mean the end of the world…or it might mean…???
Yes, fun
stuff. I actually had a lot of fun writing it, but the editing was straight
from the gaping maw of the soul sipping Cthulhu himself.
Is the book
better at this point? Yeah. I will admit that. And I did prove to myself that
even when every nerve and creative synapsis is dead on arrival, I can reach
into my deepest pit of hell and find something.
I’m waiting
with baited breath for the next round. And preparing my talisman’s of power. I
wonder if Zee knows voodoo?
My point?
Well, I know it may not sound like it, but this was an empowering exercise and
I can now say with confidence? “You think you are out of gas? You think you
can’t do it anymore? Creativity has died a long slow death along your spine?
Well. MAGGOTS! GET OUT OF THE MUD AND PULL UP YOUR PANTIES AND DO IT! DO IT! DO
IT!”
Or I’ll sic
Zee on you.P.S.
The next
round came and I was given three days to cut 175 uses of the name Jerrod by at
least ¾ and the same with the 145 times I used Nicholas. Plus about the 32
times I used the word cousin. I did it. My brain is now so torqued it’s hard to
walk.
P.S.S.
I must have done a great job with Jerrod... Third round of edits she added a few of them back in. ;-)
What was the last thing you didn’t
think you could do and you did it anyway? Did it kill you? What’s your
nightmare story?
Friday, October 5, 2012
Polishing
*Climbing aboard the rum barrel, tankard in hand, partly
snookered…to rant.
Exactly what the hell does polishing mean? Honestly?
If you’re talking about silver it’s a pain in the ass
process involving smelly compounds, gloves and getting crap stuck in your
fingernails. (Even with the gloves on.)
If it’s jewelry, it’s about finding one of those bloody
polishing clothes, giving up, going out and buying another one, using it, then
finding the six other ones you have.
If it’s a book you’re written? I don’t have a bloody idea. I
mean, what is the difference between copy editing, where one removes all the
overused words, like sigh, nod, grin, turn…and all. And you correct the over
fondness for ellipses, or M dashes or exclamation points or whatever little pet
trick slips into a MS. You make sure you didn’t change the name of the heroine,
hero, villain, ship, city…or how it’s spelled…
This is copyediting, right?
RIGHT?
Polishing for genre? Well, if you’re smart, you already know
the basics of your genre so you started out writing to fit those places of
sparkle and shine. As for tweaking to satisfy editor/publisher/agent
nuances…it’s insane. They are constantly changing. Might as well take aim at a
speedy hummingbird with a peashooter.
Sure, there are format things that you can make certain of.
But can you polish a MS for a specific audience? I mean polish means it’s done.
The basic form is locked in, it’s a shape. A spoon, a broche, a teapot. You
can’t just…polish to something else!
Me? I just don’t know what the hell to do anymore. I’m
advised to polish before hitting that send button. Well, crap. It’s as polished
as it’s gonna get without some specific guidelines from someone who sees past
the bits of tarnish to the potential. I can’t polish to everyone’s taste! And
I’ve lost the ability to figure out what anyone wants. I know what I want. To
have fun.
Besides, some people like that bit of black behind the gem
to offset the metal’s gleam. Some want it to be blindingly sparkly to the point
of no real definition to the piece.
I CAN’T DO IT!
*Falls off rum barrel and staggers over to the bar to refill
tankard.
Deep breath.
I don’t know what
polish means anymore. What does it mean to you?
Sunday, February 21, 2010
What Joan Rivers Can Teach Us About Revisions
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately, thinking of things to do with my time off on Thursday and Friday. I took time off with no particular vacation hot spot in mind; just wanted to be free to do Hellion Happy Things. Incidentally refining the list of Hellion Happy Things has been quite entertaining for several evenings, as I prioritize what I really want to do.Most of the list involves girl stuff. Hair cut, eyebrow grooming, hair dying, and a pedicure. And some wine drinking. Just basic: “I want to loll around all day, pretending I’m a New Jersey housewife.” Minus the tanning. (And no vajazzling, so don’t bother asking.) If you saw me right now, you’d realize why all these activities made my list. Spring is coming, by God. And before Spring gets here, I need to make a half effort to actually not frighten strangers with what I look like now. It’s bad. Kathy Bates from Misery bad.
My hair style’s grown out; my eyebrows are crazy; my toenails look boring; and I’ve got a general malaise where Winter is concerned that I’m hoping some laughter with girlfriends and a bottle of wine will cure. The problems are plain and obvious and they’re things I can fix. Or more honestly, my checkbook can fix.
Then as I was making my list, I had a mini-epiphany: when you leave things alone for three months, it’s a lot easier to see what needs to be fixed.
Consider a finished manuscript. Once I finished my first manuscript, all I saw were articles constantly harping to leave your manuscript alone for at least 6 weeks (better three months) before you do revisions. But no one ever wants to do that, do they? No. They want to do it now. They want to polish and polish and then send it out in the world (which of course I did) for everyone to love it. And which of course nobody did. At the time, I was dejected by this global rejection, but now I can see the point.
I realize now a lot of our efforts to polish and polish newly finished manuscripts is like sending Joan Rivers New Jersey Housewives out to find husbands when they’ve spent the last month in a spa. They’re too tanned, too false, too plucked, and too alike. There is nothing natural anymore because they spent all their time looking in one of those mirrors that magnifies your pores by ten times. They fix the molehills instead of the mountains. They lose their inner sparkle. They’re husks of their real selves.
I beg you: learn from Joan Rivers. Don’t start cutting right away! Let your natural beauty rest and shine for a while, then carefully and prudently correct where correction is needed. And don’t overpluck. Do not turn your manuscript into a husk of its former glory because you can’t step away long enough to look at it objectively.
I realize a lot of us like to write cleanly, edit as we go—and I’m not trying to change that. That works for a lot of writers; and if it works, don’t tinker with it. (Bull Durham: don’t fuck with a winning streak. I get that.) But once you’ve written your first clean draft; once you’ve finally gotten to the end—let the damned thing sit the Winter in a drawer before you run it through its final polish. It’s a lot easier to see the obvious when you do.
Have you ever overplucked one of your manuscripts? How do you keep yourself from editing too soon? How do you feel about eyebrows? What things do you like to do to get ready for Spring and chase away the blues of a long Winter? And if you had a day off to do whatever you wanted, what would you do? (You don’t get extra brownie points if you virtuously say: “I’d write all day.” I won’t believe you.)
P.S. SPECIAL SHOUT OUT TO WACKIE JACKIE, WHO IS CELEBRATING HER BIRTHDAY TODAY! DRINK UP A CELEBRATORY DRINK FOR MY DEAR FRIEND, JACK!
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