Xandra Gregory » edits http://www.xandragregory.com/blog The Passion of a Thousand Burning Suns Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:36:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Edits Away! http://www.xandragregory.com/blog/2009/08/06/edits-away/ http://www.xandragregory.com/blog/2009/08/06/edits-away/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:36:10 +0000 Xandra http://www.xandragregory.com/blog/?p=197 Surprisingly, it took me a week to get through the copy edits of Jolly Rogered. I’m very happy to be working with the same editor I had with Alien Communion–she’s a grammatical nitpicker and I’m down with that. Plus, it gave me a chance to catch a rather glaring error I had on page one, no less (yikes!). Now, I’m one of those authors who obsesses over a manuscript before it even goes out to submission. I go over a finished manuscript with a fine-toothed comb at least three times before it gets sent out. First I read it for flow, changing stuff here and there if it sounds awkward or stumpy. Then I go through it looking for things like commas, misspellings, missing or dropped words, too many “-ly” or “just” or any other repetitive “pet words” I tend to adopt through a manuscript. Finally, I go through for formatting, removing extra spaces, making sure all my scene breaks break the same, and making sure that my chapters end with a page break and new chapters are properly pushed down the page however far they’re supposed to be pushed down. And then I give it another once-over after I’ve saved it, just to make sure the file conversions go through properly.

And I still missed half a sentence in the course of things. On the first page. Awful, huh? Then, in the course of edits, at one point, I saved and closed the file for the night. The next day, I reopened the file and found out that my straight quotes/smart quotes settings had been reversed. Cue Xandra frantically combing through the entire story looking at every single quote.

And to top that off, I just realized, I forgot to put the blurb at the top of the document. Cue Xandra’s hair falling out. Head, meet desk.

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