Final Editing

Hooray! Can I celebrate? Not so fast. Much work is ahead. It's called marketing!

Aside from that, I think it can be said the book is done. Today, I flipped the clean, edited, final manuscript file back to the publisher. It was hard to let it go. I wanted to read it again. How many times do you have to read 430 pages of double-spaced manuscript before you are finally content with it? I actually enjoy reading it. I have favorite chapters that I read again and again, crying and laughing at the appropriate places. Did I say the book is both funny and sad? I keep finding little tweaks here and there. I didn't want to change much now as it wouldn't pass by the expert eyes of my editor. He went over it with a magnifying glass and trust, me, he wasn't polite. If you can't handle criticism, don't write. Oh! It wasn't that bad, but every page was full of blue and red marks. He did his job. Blue indicated an addition and red indicated a deletion. It also includes format errors. I had to approve every change using the track changes feature in MS Word. Every track had to be reviewed and accepted/rejected. It was a major effort. There were those missed words that the brain will automatically insert no matter how many times you, yourself, read it. I don't care how good you think you are, you can't avoid having your work professionally copy edited for grammar, spelling, punctuation and word usage. There were several of those missing quotation marks, commas galore deleted, missed periods at the end of sentences and all those run-on words: some hyphenated and some not. If I'd better applied the usage of "who," which," and "that," there wouldn't have been too much wrong with it--just a repetition of those errors. At some point in the writing, I got lazy and didn't look some words up such as ball handler which is correctly written as ballhandler. The spell check doesn't approve but the online dictionaries list it as one word. The editor will use a different standard. He's a professional and he knows what is the standard for published literature. Well, okay, let's be honest here. The final editing was after the appraisal process where I had to correct up-teen million errors that were mentioned. After that gleaning, I didn't think he would find anything wrong with it. Boy was I wrong!

I added more poetry and I was concerned about over-doing it and detracting from the story. The editor liked it but he said not to add any more. So I did. There was one more verse about traversing North Dakota at night by train. I added it. I think it is okay. I have additional pages of train poetry that I might publish sometime somewhere. Also, I added in all three verses of a song sung by one of the central characters when he was working on the train. It all adds to more bulk. Most novels are not as long as this one. I didn't want to shorten it further.

In between wading through 430 pages of editing, I also approved the cover design. What do you think? The editor wrote up a synopsis to appear on the back cover (I avoid using that or which) and that is kind of like not buying any product made in China. Let's just play it by the odds, if you use "that" the editor will change it to "which." I was flattered by what the editor wrote up for the back cover. I better just accept it as a compliment and be humble. I'll clue you in later. I knew he liked the book from the appraisal, provided that I agreed to make the changes he recommended. Lastly, there was the interior layout that required my attention. I will be getting back a sample chapter for my approval. They seem to be moving fast, so I'm hoping for good progress. Since I last wrote, I've been busy.