Checking In

It’s nice to be missed…even if only by ONE lousy blog reader who sent me a private email.

Anyway, a half-hour ago, I hit “SEND” to forward the product of another zillion hours of reading, revising, and editing Stealing Amy to my publisher.

Yep, like I’ve said folks. The work doesn’t stop once you sign the contract.

You’re probably thinking, hey−what about her editor? Well, I don’t have one assigned yet. And you know what? Turns out I’m glad. Because I realized something important: I’d been visualizing an editor as a safety net, y’know? Like whatever I missed, she’d catch. Then I started thinking, WAIT. What if she doesn’t? It’s still MY name on the book. It’s not like the old days when editors functioned as copyeditors and really DID fulfill the role of backup.

With that in mind, I looked at revising Stealing Amy in a whole new way−a way in which, I’m learning, I should have been been looking at it all along.

There’s no room for errors. There’s no excuse for sloppiness. Every detail is important.

(Ack. Me! Detailed-oriented. Uh-OH, huh?)

I wish I’d kept track of how many times I’ve gone through this manuscript (and I’m only referring to the times SINCE Triskelion accepted it for publication.) And I wish I knew I’d done it for the last time…but alas, but probably not.

Like I said, an editor hasn’t even seen it yet!

So, here’s what’s kept me from blogging much in the past couple of weeks: the major passes I remember (in random order):

1. Check formatting, including: appropriate spacing between periods and next sentence. Sounds odd, but it’s something you gotta do and, trust me, takes a lot of time and effort, not to mention undivided attention. Yes, you can arrange for your settings to tip you off, but they’re not fail safe. You really gotta focus.

2. Check all Spanish. Stealing Amy takes place in Mexico; hence, a lot of Spanish words. Guess what? I took French in school. This time, not something I could use a Microsoft Word tool for.

3. Do a search and replace with highlight on the word ‘heart.’ Found 87. Evaluate each one and change accordingly.

4. Check continuity. Yikes. These are things that give a writer nightmares, ‘cuz if you don’t find them, readers will. For instance, I discovered my hero, Nick, checks his watch a dozen times throughout the story. Little did I remember, way back when I started this opus, that he’d lost his watch in chapter one.

Or take another character, Jorge Santiago. In chapter seven he’s got a thick swatch of jet-black hair with twin shocks of gray at the temples. In chapter eighteen, he’s nearly bald. Oops.

Worse, I discovered a scene that’s suppose to bridge from another−except a CRITICAL piece of information disappeared in between them.

5. Good old-fashioned spell check. Ah, this one’s a killer. Wonderful as it is (and I thank Microsoft for including it) do you have any idea how long it takes to run a 375-page manuscript through it? Pure agony, I tell ya!

6. Finally, the dreaded passive sentence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know enough to avoid “to be” verbs like the plague (this blog notwithstanding−whatever that means). But sometimes, when I’m on a roll, they just…er…seem to escape my nimble fingers. THIS particular pass through the manuscript took me DAYS.

Anyway, that’s just a sampling. I’m telling ya, folks. Don’t try this at home without strict supervision.