lying for a living

I’ve just finished going through the copyedited manuscript for The Dirty Secrets Club. In the publishing process, copyediting takes place after the author delivers the final draft of a book. First the author’s editor goes through the manuscript, writing comments and questions in the margins, perhaps doing some line editing, and marking spots where the author needs to take another whack at the text.

The manuscript then goes to a copyeditor. These pros, often freelancers, wield sharpened red pencils like deadly blow-darts. They go through the manuscript again, doggedly, finding misplaced commas, misspellings, typos and grammatical errors. They also mark up the manuscript for the typesetter, getting it ready for printing. And they relentlessly ferret out continuity errors in the text. Is it Tuesday night on page 12, but Monday afternoon on page 13? Does the heroine wear jeans on page 345, and fishnets half a page later?

The author then receives the manuscript back, and gets the first glimpse of all the corrections and suggestions that need to be addressed. The first time you see a marked-up script, you think your baby’s been attacked. Or that it has the measles. Your pristine, perfect creation has red marks all over it. You then go through it, deciding whether to accept or reject each of the copyeditor’s changes. Generally, because the copyeditor is a pro, and obsessive-compulsive about finding errors, you accept most of them.

With this new book, I received two copyedited manuscripts because (awwright. Yeah! Spike the ball in the end zone and do a little victory dance…) I have both British and American editions being published next year. So I needed to go through several hundred pages, checking the 560,000 characters that constitute the script - twice. I needed to digest suggestions from readers on both sides of the Atlantic and then write all my own changes onto both manuscripts.

This isn’t tough work. (Though thank God the UK and US pages are different sizes. Otherwise it would have been appallingly easy to get them mixed in with each other.) But the timing was tight. The UK manuscript came yesterday. The US manuscript needs to be back in New York on Monday.

And yesterday we celebrated Thanksgiving. I had kids expecting turkey and pies and gravy. Massive quantities of homemade gravy.

But I got it all done. I even think my eyes will uncross again, maybe in a few days.