Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 18

The Writing Life: 108+ Steps from Victory (Or – Keyword Search Hell Awaits!)

You know, I really wanted to be done with The Killer and The Dead by now.

I haven’t fallen victim to perfectionism, honest.

What has happened is I have realized in the course of reading the book again, that in addition to making semi-final additions to the manuscript for clarity, plot, and theme advancement, and possibly my own amusement, I have also been, in passing, fixing random pieces of flabby writing as they catch my eye. Double verbs or nouns that aren’t serving any significant purpose, unwanted repetitions, unnecessary extra words that add nothing to the sentence and so are the author’s equivalent of leaving an “um” in the text. (There are a couple at least in that last sentence, but I’m not being wildly anal here, thank you very much!) These are the words that for one reason or another were buying me time as I worked out what I was doing in that sequence of the long-ago first draft, and have, through dint of unobtrusive passivity, hung around through many layers of editing to almost make it into the final version.

It is word-winnowing time. I knew it was when I randomly started doing word searches “just to see how many” are in the text – and found too many, and a bunch all clustered together that my eye and voice have passed over too many times already. I winnowed one from 44 iterations down to 16. Then searched for its similar pals, then for other words I spotted while winnowing those down, then I stopped myself and went back to fixing something else.

I didn’t want to do this. I had convinced myself that I had internalized lots of editing lessons after doing endless word searches when tidying up The Thief and The Demon’s manuscript. And I did internalize a great deal, but there is always more, verbal tics or unwanted crutches can find ways to sneak into your writing at any time. Some are new to this book that weren’t there in the last: or maybe I just didn’t notice them… aaagh! I’m not going to go check, I’m not, I’m not!

So anyway, I have at minimum 108 word searches to do of the entire manuscript. Probably more as I seek out extra words that are specific to this setting that I don’t want to batter to death. It will make the text tighter, easier to read, more engaging. That’s the point. And there is a certain pleasure to be gained from winnowing out the bogus words that have lurked for so long in the hope of not being noticed by the editor, and seeing how even small changes can reap big rewards in terms of sentence construction, presentation of meaning, strength of setting and voice.

So that’s this weekend accounted for. And probably the next. There are rabbit holes out there, and word searches reveal a lot of them. I shall have to take care not to fall down too many!

The Writing Life: It’s just 30 minutes…

I’m tired. I’d rather go to bed, but I’ve bargained with myself and asked for thirty minutes of writing, just thirty minutes and then bed. See what I can produce now (Wednesday night) to make it easier to get my blog out on time tomorrow, after another long day.

I realized yesterday that I have lost sight of a simple job I should have worked harder at for the entirety of the last year, and something I can probably profitably expend thirty minutes on, here and there, to great effect. I’ve talked about it before, but because it is always just a thirty minute job, I put if off for another day, thinking how easy it will be to find the time later.

But 30 minutes can be quite elusive, don’t you know. And yes I’m not being consistent with my numerals vs. letters. I’ll let that go tonight, see if I choose to fix it tomorrow.

My friend Jesper Schmidt reminded me, via his Facebook group, of the need to run effective Amazon ads. I’ve known this for the last year and a half. At various times I have had multiple ads running. I think for the last 6 months I’ve maybe had one, and it really needs freshening up/some allies in the field. I mean, I got my Kirkus review months ago, and half the point was to use it to season a new batch of ads, and I’ve just always found other uses for the thirty minutes or so required to get something started, or write some ad copy, or edit the ad copy I have mouldering in a file somewhere. Can the electronic moulder effectively, I wonder? I think not: no black spots across curling pages, that grow fat and fuzzy, or brittle and flaking along their exposed edges. Or welded together with dust. In Venice, I saw in various palace walk-throughs, the ledgers of storied antiquity, most often and importantly of lineage, all gummed up with years, pages indistinct behind a ribbed wall of dust and damp accretion. Looked beautiful, in their own decayed way, and so difficult to open, to peruse the history without breaking or marring it. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but tonight I lack the wit to trace it. I did once play with well preserved medieval manuscripts, golden with illuminations, rich in cobalt blue, the price of diamonds in its era. That was a rare privilege, for which I am now grateful: I took it entirely for granted then, callow swine that I was!

But anyway: advertising. I need to do that. Another thirty minutes (maybe multiples thereof, I can’t be sure) should be spent learning how to employ KDP Rocket or some similar tool to find effective keywords for my ads. All things I should have done forever ago (a different multiple of 30), and I should have been experimenting with different keywords, different bid points per click, the whole shebang. I have been quite remiss to not have done so as much as I should this past year. But I was writing the next book, you see, and so lacked the bandwidth. In the writing life you can’t afford to lack the bandwidth for multiple activities if you intend to manage those activities yourself.

So a pre-Valentine’s resolution, which I hope shall last longer that the ones typical of New Year: I’m going to spend some time, maybe even thirty minutes or so, working on my advertising copy, strategy, output every other day (every day is way too much to ask) for the next month. If I spend hours on one day, that may buy me some days off. I’ll give myself that.

And lookee here! I’m at the bottom of a page, and maybe only twenty minutes have passed since I started this ramble. 25 tops. Score. I shall to bed now, and dream of typos, links and corrections. Thirty minutes tomorrow and I might just gather them all up. (I may not have, I’m similarly zoned out today (Thursday – Happy Valentine’s day folks!), and bed almost beckoned me away from getting this disjointed effort out – but I persevered!)

Keep moving everyone, keep striving and pushing, even little bursts of activity can sometimes go a long way. Au revoir, mes amis!

Why I Write Fantasy: To Explore the Meta

To be honest, in writing The Killer and The Dead I didn’t set out to explore aspects of metafiction, which I define as fiction that interrogates itself, and that can operate in a separate space in the reader’s mind beyond merely the ingestion and understanding of the narrative: it just kind of happened. In meta fiction the subject matter can highlight, among other things, its artificiality, cast doubt on its veracity, ask the reader what they want to, or choose to believe in the narrative. A meta-fictional superstructure comes into being, a frame, or frames of reference from which to view the core story, and these frames of reference can conflict with each other, be knowing or subconscious, be obviously accessible to the reader, or shrouded and hidden in the text as an Easter egg for the discerning.

The Killer and The Dead has significant metafictional aspects. It is a first person narrative told by a prisoner (the Killer) to his unseen audience of apprentice wizards, in which he tells the story of how he came to be a prisoner in the first place. Beyond that, the listeners have been informed by their master that they must write a report based on what the prisoner tells them, and the three worst reports will result in the writers being ‘culled’. The prisoner assumes this to mean killed. Thus throughout the book the prisoner, in addition to telling/being forced to tell his tale, is using it as an audition to his captor, to justify why he should be allowed to live at the tale’s end, and he is also trying to undermine, mislead, and trap the listeners into writing reports that will be clumsy enough to get them killed. Yes, it is somewhat ambitious, but I believe in aiming high, and in trying to stretch myself and do something new with each project. The book thus has a frame story – the killer telling his tale to his audience (and of course by extension the unseen audience is also the reader), and the actual narrative of his adventures and misdeeds that got him to the point of being captured.

The story is set in a world of paranoid misery, where everyone, including the killer, lies to get by. Everyone wears false-faces, masks, in order to survive. (Not literally though!) The narrative, which has interjections and speculations by the killer sprinkled through it aimed directly at his fictional audience (never at the reader directly, I did not want to break the 4th wall: that was a meta too far for me!), thus already exists on a few different levels – the simple narrative, and the expression of the Killer’s goals, his interrogator’s goals, and the presumed lessons the apprentices will choose to highlight in their reports, and how then those reports will be used by their master to judge their fitness to avoid being culled.

So that is fairly meta already. I am trying to channel Philip K. Dick into a fantasy novel. I look forward to seeing how successful you guys think I have been!

Where I go full force into the meta, I think, is in my idea to write a bunch of the apprentices’ reports. These will be fictional commentaries about my fictional tale, told by a desperate killer to a group of people threatened with death if they poorly analyze what he has to say. A few will be put in appendices at the end of the book. More will appear here, on this site. I intend to use each report to highlight both the character of the apprentice writing it, and different threads of the story: what each apprentice will decide is the main point of the narrative, be it psychological, socioeconomic, political, or magical, among many others – I have at least thirteen outlined already.

Here is my question to you: Is that a bridge too far? Are you intrigued by these commentaries, or do they turn you off? I like the idea, in the future, of inviting readers to write their own commentaries, imagining themselves as an apprentice. There shall be prizes, and the best shall be admitted into canon with the ones I write.

Does that sound like a good idea, or is it all far too meta for words?

Have a good evening everyone, and remember to keep seeing the wood for the trees!

The Writing Life: Imagining Success

Hi there folks! I did finally finish my vocalization of The Killer and The Dead today, and many improvements have been made, and a mere thirty two notes to self generated. You know, changes, continuity checks, questions for proofers and beta readers, that kind of thing.

I’m still a few steps away from hitting the publish button, but I do wonder now what success means to me in writing. It keeps evolving. In my youth I craved fortune and fame, now, I clearly see the pitfalls of fame, and fortune, well it would be nice to make more money from writing, but my targets are not as vast as once they were!

Writing for public consumption is an ego flaying thing, even before anyone reads a word, because you have to be ready for the worst responses, even as you crave the best. You also have to be prepared for vast, indifferent, silence. That’s a tough one, and the only way to deal with it, in my experience, is to keep working, take steps forward in your craft. The simple path to sanity is not to read any reviews, once you start getting them. It is hard though. It’s a funny thing – writers are advised to have a social media presence, to reach out to readers, to be available and enthusiastic, and yet not respond to reviews, a primary piece of evidence of reader engagement. I know why, (it’s a sanity shredding road to hell) but it does strike me as an interesting conundrum, and makes me wonder about all the other forms of author-reader engagement. The primary interface, for me, should be the book. The thing I wrote, that I hope you’ll enjoy reading.

So now my imagining of success is a smaller, simpler thing than once it was. It is having books I’m proud of, that are as good as I can make them in a reasonable span of time. Writing as many of them as I can in the years left to me, as long as I believe in the story, and the quality of their telling. I want to better myself each time out, improve the reading experience with each publication. I was in a mad rush to crank out books every year, to build a brand, to become a thing. I’m not so sure about that anymore. I think it is more important for me, right now, to build a sure foundation for myself as a writer, have ideas and stories I believe in. The Killer and The Dead is something I am very proud of, and look forward to sharing, when it is ready. Which will be soon, just like its cover, hahahaha!

Keep writing everyone, and pursue your ideas of success, whatever shape they may take!

 

Why I Write Fantasy: To try to Touch the Unknown.

The adventure of a blank page is the infinite possibilities it represents. Each word written at first narrows the choices left for those to follow, words determining their most likely successors, options being lost due to the rules of grammar, the syntax of language. But, after a time a magical thing can happen: the groups of words, obeying some rules, perhaps daring to break others, become more than the sum of their parts, and even careworn old collections of letters can shine in a way that is novel.

I write fantasy because it is freeing, the lack of initial constraints, no need for faithfulness to known geography, period, technology, or language. I admire writers of contemporary fiction – it is no easy task to capture parts of our world faithfully, present what many people are familiar with as new, and not trip up over some detail that has pedants howling at the author for getting ‘it’ wrong. I wrote something set in what might have ended up being a version of Denver a few years ago, though I intentionally kept it vague because tying myself to modern landmarks felt stifling. Already so much of the technology mentioned in passing in that story is obsolete. I doubt the Devil will use messenger to communicate in today’s stories! And I couldn’t even begin to keep up with the landscape of phone apps and interfaces, it seems each year has its own fad, a next big thing that is so two years ago to those in the know, and which flames out or gets bought by the tech giants just in time for the next sensation to appear.

So, intimidated by the thought of keeping such modern details accurate, fantasy appeals as a place in which you are in command of the rules, at least at first. I’ve talked about that a little elsewhere, and maybe I’ll go into more depth about the attractions of, and my approach to world building in another blog. The other thing I like about fantasy is that it is easier, I think, in this medium to push characters and ideas into new hypothetical positions, to explore quandaries and conflicts that the contemporary writer cannot easily access. I mean, all of human experience can be described in contemporary realism, every emotion, every conflict, overt and internal can be explored, the shape of life and how the sublime can exist in even the most apparently mundane circumstances, but you’re never going to get to pit your characters against blood spirits, or explore what thousands of years of life does to the perspective of someone who was once merely human. For me fantasy offers those chances (and so many more!), frames of reference that cannot exist in contemporary realistic literature, but can share the same aims, namely to find novel ways to explore what it is that makes us human, what characteristics we share, what responses we might have to the unknown.

And in fantasy, big metaphysical ideas can be given form and flesh, personified and played with in ways that cannot be done in other genres, and because the situations can be so varied, so new, very strange hypotheticals can be born, yet still have an impact beyond their novelty, can still trace their way back to our world, our experience. Dark, bright, or distorted versions of our world can slide through fantasy, even as the tale simply stands on its own as an adventure worth reading.

That is another lure for me in writing fantasy, this urge to not only capture new conflicts, new ideas, new demonstrations of strength and frailty, but to do it whilst telling a rousing tale filled with old familiar things: love, hatred, family, friendships, betrayal, and to have the old and new coexist, perhaps complement each other, while never getting in the way of the story, the magical journey our minds share as we turn pages, or swipe screens, the incredible human experience of words allowing one mind to touch another even if oh so very indirectly, and maybe, through fiction, share something real.

When I said aim high in another blog, I meant it. I also know that reach exceeding grasp is a very real thing, but dammit, I have to try.

The Writing Life : Speed Bumps

You get yourself a little momentum going. You think “Yeah, my voice is a little scratchy because I’ve beeen reading my book out loud, and some tricky parts of it repeatedly, for hours.”

Nope, you’ve got that seasonal cold thingy. A brain of snot. Dawesomb.

It happens. That strange lightheaded inability to focus because no damn reason at all. Or sinus pressure that you remember old people talking about when you were younger and laughed incredulously at, because you’d had a runny nose your entire life but had never experienced pressure up there.

Incredibly, it will be February tomorrow.

I really thought, back in November, that The Killer and The Dead would absolutely be published by now.

I recognise it won’t be for 2 months minimum. I don’t want to admit that, but I’m going to finish the out-loud in cigar-croak voice section maybe tomorrow, certainly on Saturday. But this run through has revealed to me how many simple fixes need to be made to my prose, the nut and bolt tightenings that I wanted to disregard a few months ago in order to hit my schedule.

They cannot be disregarded. I think I have something special in this next book, and it would be foolish to sabotage it by not doing my due diligence. I have caught enough things this read through, improved enough sentences and paragraphs, to know that being more systematic will yield more rewards.

I just didn’t want to in November. I wanted to hurl the book out there, as raw as its narrator and imagine the two things would excuse each other. Maybe they would have, I’ll not know now.

Now I know I need to control my overuse of words like ‘now’. Along with many others. I just edited three nows out of this blog.

It is funny – this blog is in many ways an inescapable advertisement for my writing, and it is written by me, in what can only ever be my written style*. So my writing is on display in every blog, eternal exemplar. But I do not edit these blogs very much at all, in comparison to my novels. If I did I’d be lucky to publish one a month. Most I write in Word first, the last three, not so much. I’m trying to close the gap in my hasty writings, to remember the rules I cleave to when writing more formally, but the truth is I often forget.

So yeah, I got sick this week. Bummer.

 

 

 

 

 

*I believe that a writer can write in many styles, and yet still have a style all of their own that might haunt them, should they try too hard to shake it off. Break it down, try to understand how it works, yes, indulge it other times, sure, but not too hard, or it becomes boated and useless. Deny it and try to eradicate it at your peril. Your style, your way, is you. Took me a long time to stop being self-conscious about the way I am in writing. But I still use the word now far too often. And still. Dammit.

 

The Writing Life: Momentum

Another rapid freehand blog today. Which means five plus edits after publication – my apologies to those of you who get version one mailed to you!

My face is hot. I think because I’ve been talking for hours. To myself. I’ve been reading The Killer and The Dead aloud, and I’m here to say (thankfully not aloud) that it is harder than you’d think to read your words, and actually say every single one of them, and not skip over some.

Of course that’s a good thing – if you notice that you keep skipping over some words in a sentence, then maybe they don’t need to be there. Cut! But what about the times you don’t notice, and blithely pass over those extra words? Well – that’s why there are multiple passes of editing, you give yourself the chance to catch that sucker next time!

I’ve heard tell there are apps now that will read your work to you. However tedious I may find reading my own work (when I’m not descending into giggles at how good parts of it are (and yes, just let me have that right now – I have enough other periods of despair at how awful it all is too!)), I think listening to machine voice read it to me would be worse. But fellow authors have assured me it is a great tool to help you catch mistakes and awkward phrasing in your own writing, precisely because the program does not unconsciously skip over any of your words, and so faithfully renders every syllable back to you, whether you like them or not! I should give it a shot.

Anyway, I’m just about half-way through now, and have hopes I could get near to done over the weekend. One more phase complete, another layer of dust removed from those glass tables. After that I think I will do some Don McNair word searches (plus some of my own I came up with when following his advice last time out and through that recognised tics of my own that needed to be reined in. I won’t give examples because otherwise you will totally notice them!) and maybe then be just about ready to declare myself done and allow others to proofread – so I can inevitably be shocked (and oh so grateful) for all the things they catch!

The important thing is the sense of progress I’m getting again. Momentum has been gained and text is being read, parsed, corrected and improved as I pass. A couple of darlings have been killed, a very random piece of extra lore has been added, and a handful of good notes created for me to address. Continuity niggles to check – I’m having to be mindful of the “what did he know and when?” issues for my narrator, and caught one potential reference to information he should not have had today, though I need to recheck the first hundred pages or so to be sure. It might be justified, but it might not, so I’m going to have to go back and be sure I planted the right seeds earlier, and did not just forget and add authorial knowledge to my character in that scene and accidentally forsehadow information he will only discover 30 pages later.

Writing, it is a headstretcher, for sure.

But this is part of what I love – so much work by now has gone into story and character that you want to get all the touches right, and the novel becomes part puzzle, part engine, a thing to be put together properly so it can run as smoothly as possible for the reader. Copy edits, and these final run throughs are the carb cleanings, the radiator flushes, the fresh spark plugs the book needs for everything to work as it should. I’m really reaching there, sorry!

Once again I can see how easy it would be to fall into the obsessive rabbit hole of perfectionism at this stage. I have on this run spotted a bunch of unintentional repetitions that are not good, sometimes pages or chapters apart, but all that does is tell me I’ve missed plenty of others. The best is when I go looking for one thing, and discover something entirely other that is an issue. On page one. It is fixed now. But this is how I come to understand those authors who never release the next book. This phase can literally go on forever, if you let it.

I’m going to avoid that, if I can. I have momentum, and I have a goal, and I want to share this with others, not hoard it to myself forever, feverishly polishing. I can’t lie, this is (as usual) taking longer than I’d have wanted, and is delaying my timetable for the next book, but part of my sense of momentum today is the feeling that the detailed work is right, and necessary, and as long as I can keep powering into it and it doesn’t turn into a procrastinatory frittering of time, then it will be useful. The skill is to know when that corner gets turned!

Okay folks, see you later – keep writing, and reading, in your outside voices!

 

Why I Write Fantasy: Death and Freedom

I’m not publishing the blog I wrote earlier today. Didn’t quite capture what I wanted to say. So instead I’m freehanding this one, not even a spellchecker to save me!

I started writing fantasy, as I’ve said elsewhere, to create worlds of my own to escape into, after enjoyng the sensation of entering into other universes made for me by writers of powerful imagination. It was all I wanted to do, imagine things and write them down. What could be more fun than that? If only the writing down was as easy as the imagining!

Of course I grew, learned, broadened my horizons somewhat, and wanted to do more than merely imagine, as if that were not sufficient. (It totally can be!) I wanted to say something. Preferably something important.

So I wrote a book that at heart was about death. A very intellectual death, conceptual, with ramifications and social and psychological impacts, the whole nine. Death was foreign to me at the time, so I could imagine it as I wished. I feel death in my bones now, feel it in the judder of my heart, so that early book seems charming to me in my remembrance of its conceits. I haven’t read it in years – know I wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to ‘fix’ it. So I let it be. One day.

Now, when I think about it, I write books about freedom. And power. And redemption. And love. And sacrifice. I am not in prison, or a gulag, I am not constrained by poverty, bound by pride (I had my moments, but have been profoundly humbled enough times to try to keep myself grounded, most of the time!), I do not believe I am trapped in ignorance, though I think we all labour through life being waylaid by the things we do not know, and should have learned about earlier. Still, the idea of freedom (and those others that always seem to tag along) tasks me, for now, and so I shall pursue it in my writings a while yet.

Freedom and oppression. The little guy against impossible odds. The search for redemption, even when it might be denied. The oldest and most contemporary story of them all: how everything came to be, and why everything is as it is. Those are the stories I always imagined, and I’m still just trying to write them down.

This isn’t what I was trying to say either, but what the hell. Capturing a thought with words is another windmill of mine. Another attempt can always be had. Next time with Dwarves.

 

 

The Writing Life: Bandaid Ripped Off

So I finished all the primary adjustments to The Killer and The Dead today. Then I accepted all on every other change in the document made by my editor. (I have read them all in passing, but not focused on them as it is just too deep a rabbithole for me to fall down.) I’m trusting myself to spot any alterations so made that do not align with my sense of how the writing and its subjects should be presented.

Now begins the long dark of reads and re-reads, tweaks and adjustments, Don McNair’s advice echoing in my head, threatening to overwhelm me with the number of things to stay alive to, to notice and adjust. I had hoped after laboriously going through the twenty one steps during the writing of The Thief and The Demon that those lessons would be solidly ingrained, and some have been, but there’s nothing like being systematic to show you how much you missed when you thought you were being careful.

This phase is where I may start actively hating the search function.

I already have an excuse to let it slide: jumping from instance to instance robs me of a sense of context, I shouldn’t make changes like that in isolation. (So maybe I should just leave well alone, is the hint.) Well, that’s why I’m reading it through first, live and in the vocal raw. Red marks and notes will sprout across the newly virgin pages. Then those shall be gone through and tidied away. Most changes I hope will be done in context, as I advance with the book held fresh in my mind. We shall see.

Then it will be time for the search function game, to let it highlight the recurrences my eye has refused to notice. Not everything will be changed, but it behooves me to check, and be sure.

The final completion date of the book keeps scrolling away. This is okay. I can reel it back with some solid work. I have hopes for this weekend, when not finally taking down the Christmas trees! The writing needs to be tightened up, made ready for the sea trials of last proofing reads. What leaks can be plugged now, should be.

Okay, I’d like to start reading now. An hour in before bed. Editing, like so much else in writing, is a marathon, not a sprint. I have to cut the clichés out too, dammit.

The Writing Life: Trust Your Editor and Yourself When Dusting Glass Tables

Hello, and Happy New Year, folks!

(I’ll do a New Year’s thought another day.)

The copy edit of The Killer and The Dead continues in my basement of dust and glass tables. It ain’t for sissies. But the book is awesome, if I say so myself.

I have continued to do 10, or 20, or even a few hundred little edits a day. I had a bunch of editorial questions to answer. In reading and answering them I created more questions and reminders for myself throughout the text, unfortunate things that require additions and revisions, the things you naively imagine you have moved past when you get to the copy edit stage.

But no. You may not have to entirely rewrite a scene, but reimagining parts of it, and then smoothing the edges so it flows naturally might happen. Little things like changing the material of a chimney for instance. It can be much more of a pain in the backside than you may imagine. More insidiously, you might have a great idea to add something in late in the book that beautifully echoes a conversation way earlier in the story, and then have to wrestle with whether you’re being artfully clever, or beating the reader over the head with a dead horse, which generally readers don’t thank you for doing. Horse guts be smelly, and make poor scarves. (Who am I kidding, I’m totally going to go for the echo! I’ll be subtle, honest.)

Yes, I’m punchy tonight. Long day in front of screens followed by coming home to sit in front of a screen can do that do a person. So I’m listening to wonderfully cheesy late 80s and early 90s dance and battering this out with minimal editing! Hey just came across this! Not heard that in years. Not as good as This though! (Well, they are different moods, really, different soundscapes, different dances.) Some good times to versions of those songs, many moons ago.

Anyway, I have 10 questions left to answer. There will be minor rewrites to answer them, so I’ve left them to last. Thinky bits that might be best approached when I have more mental reserve than tonight. Then a few thousand line changes. I am about to make the point I started writing this blog to get to. And I have not been artful about it.

If you pay a professional to copy edit your work, trust them.

That does not mean agree with every suggestion, make every change, no. It does mean consider the changes, think about why they were suggested. But once you are done with those, and what is left is the grammatical changes, then trust your copy editor, and rip the bandaid off.

What do I mean by that? I think I’ve said it before, but I’ll explain again.

I’m not going to read my book over and agonise over every altered comma. I’m going to make a copy of the book with all those red changes intact, and then I will simply accept all changes. Rip the bandaid off. Accept all. Trust the professional you hired to help you.

It is a huge time saver.

This only the first copy edit pass, to be honest. I am pretty intimately acquainted with the words in my book, their order, and intended meanings.

Ripping off the bandaid gets me to the next pass that much faster.

I trust that I will catch any changes that break my intended meanings. If something strikes me as off, I can shift it as it jumps out at me. If it doesn’t jump out at me, how important was it? A tree falling in the forest kind of question there. Most changes won’t register because they work with my writing, help and improve it. A few I will notice and shrug and let it go. A couple I might break out older versions of the digital manuscript (misnomer? I mean, can a manuscript really be digital?) and compare what was before. It doesn’t happen much.

In short – when you get to the copy edit stuff, go through the higher level changes carefully , the questions, the highlighted repetitions (which are a one thousandth of the repetitions you will find over the next 3-5  passes – I already found a bunch for each of the ones pointed out to me. I am sure I have said this elsewhere, but not all repetition is bad. Some of it is even deliberate!), the tense shifts (yes I’m still debating those – but I’m bandaiding a few of them too, to see how it reads when I read the book over again with no red on the page, and see what strikes me as incongruous), but when you get to the grammatical nuts and bolts, trust your copy editor and accept all, leave it for a day or two, then start reading it fresh and see how much you notice!

Trust yourself also – you will see the things that don’t work, you don’t have to slog through all the correct changes to find the problematic ones. They’ll pop out anyway, because even the best editors are going to sometimes read something the ‘wrong’ way – which itself can be instructive, you need to ask what in your writing led to that interpretation, and how to use it, or eliminate it, depending on your goals. You can’t control the reader, interesting interpretations of your words will happen, but do your best to be clear where you want clarity, ambiguous where you want mystery. That is very exciting! Trust yourself to know your own writing, and let your instincts guide you when reading something for the thirty fifth time.

Just kidding, there is no way I’m doing thirty five more passes. Four tops and I’m done. Probably five. Six or seven when you count formatting reads. It is what it is, and every pass makes it better, so I embrace it. There are more stories to tell, and this one is almost ready to share.