The sanity of an good editor
If you read my last post you know I was struggling with some of my proof editor's comments about certain character names.
I took some advice from my readers (Thanks K.T, Mel, Aldrea and Angela) and I went ahead and changed them all.
Luckily I also emailed my publisher and told him of the changes, and I received a wonderful email telling me to stop the press and not change a thing.
I think it is easy to lose sight of the big picture when you have written something as long as a novel. Especially when you have had half a dozen people give you their opinion on everything from your character names to plot points. It can be tempting to give in to every demand and try and make your book everything for everyone.
But that can be a real bad idea, almost as bad as not taking any advice at all.
This is when a good editor can save your sanity. As much as they are the one who asks you to sacrifice your first born on the rocks, they can also be the hand that holds you back from the killing blow.
So now I am -- I think -- almost done. As in, the final edit, pack it up and ship it off to the printers done. I will sleep on it tonight, and give it one last look tomorrow to make sure I didn't miss anything that Word's "find replace" stuffed up. (does anyone else have trouble with bloody Word not being able to find, you know, words?)
So thank you again, dear editors everywhere, we need you more than we know.
(If you need a good book to read, Michael, my editor, is also a writer. Perhaps that is why he understood the need to let my Warlock keep his name)
Hope all goes well on the final read through :-)
ReplyDeleteWell hooray for not having to change your names. That's wonderful.
ReplyDeleteGreat! Changing names can bothersome. I'm so glad you can keep them. Remember, it's really all about what feels and reads right.
ReplyDeleteNames can be so powerful. And I totally agree that we can get caught up in pleasing everyone. Your voice as a writer can get muddled. Yay, for editors! The Harry Potter books had a lot of names you had to roll around on your tongue to get used to, but they are SO much of who the character's are. Glad you get to keep your names and I hope your last run through goes well.
ReplyDeleteYay for being almost done. Hope you don't get any final Word gremlins.
ReplyDeleteNice to hear Michael is an understanding editor.
Word gremlins! don't get me started! That program exists to fuck with my sanity. Find replace didn't work yesterday. At all. Then I opened the document in Pages to fix a few last things, then pages exported back to docx, and in the process deleted all my italics.
ReplyDeleteI have spent the day trawling through the text (again) searching for the missing formatting. It didn't help that all my magic spells were in italics.
Sigh. There is a lot to be said for pen and paper and paid help to transcribe it all. Bring on proper voice recognition AI says I. I am sick of typing.