Debra's had a writerly week.
While I'm still waiting on the cover revision for Family Secrets, with bated breath and crossed fingers, the galleys arrived this week so I've been knee-deep in eagle-eyed checking. I'm nearly done and have found a few spots that need to be fixed, but not too many, so that's a good thing.
Then out of the blue, the 'solution' to a plotting dilemma came to me. I've always wanted to write a rock star romance. The hero would be a rock star with a secret and the heroine would be the reporter trying to figure it out. The problem was, I had no idea what the secret was going to be. So I just nudged the idea to the back of my brain and figured one day, something would come to me. Well, for whatever reason, today was the day. I was powering up the lap top getting ready to work on that galley, and the secret came to me. Just like that, out of the blue. I honestly don't know what prompted it, but it was definitely one of those light bulb moments. So I quickly jotted a few notes to save to my flash drive before tackling another hour or so of galley proofing.
It just goes to show, if you're patient enough, the ideas will come. Now I just have to find the time to write the story. And finish another I've started. Good thing summer vacation is just a couple of months away!
Until next time,
Happy Reading!
Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com
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Showing posts with label galleys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label galleys. Show all posts
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Thursday, February 28, 2013
The Galley Stage
When a manuscript reaches the galley stage it's an exciting time. It's literally the last phase before getting a release date. So I was thrilled to find my galley file for The Vampire and the Vixen in my inbox earlier this week. This is my last chance to catch those pesky misspellings, grammar errors, and misuse of words. Any errors I find need to be listed out with page and line numbers.
Once I give the okay, it's going to publication as is.
Hopefully there won't be many. The mss has already gone through two edits with my editor and the read-throughs I'd given it before submitting. One major thing I found in the second round of editor edits was I'd used two different names for one of the minor charactors. Ooops.
But these types of proofreading errors are the only ones I'm supposed to be looking for. Which, as exciting as getting a galley is, can make doing this final, final read-through a little frustrating. Because at this point, it's past the time to correct or change anything about the story itself. What's on the page is on the page. At this point, if I'm second-guessing anything, I'm pretty much out of luck. My editor explicity said, "...stick to things that MUST be changed."
I honestly don't do a lot of second-guessing at this stage, but knowing I can't change anything about the plot makes this read-through very intersting. More clinical than creative.
But, like I said, it's an exciting stage to be at. My responsibility is to approve the galley. The publisher's responsibility is to create a cover. And then we'll be good to go and heading toward a release date. And there's nothing sweeter than that!
Until next time,
Happy Reading!
Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com
Once I give the okay, it's going to publication as is.
Hopefully there won't be many. The mss has already gone through two edits with my editor and the read-throughs I'd given it before submitting. One major thing I found in the second round of editor edits was I'd used two different names for one of the minor charactors. Ooops.
But these types of proofreading errors are the only ones I'm supposed to be looking for. Which, as exciting as getting a galley is, can make doing this final, final read-through a little frustrating. Because at this point, it's past the time to correct or change anything about the story itself. What's on the page is on the page. At this point, if I'm second-guessing anything, I'm pretty much out of luck. My editor explicity said, "...stick to things that MUST be changed."
I honestly don't do a lot of second-guessing at this stage, but knowing I can't change anything about the plot makes this read-through very intersting. More clinical than creative.
But, like I said, it's an exciting stage to be at. My responsibility is to approve the galley. The publisher's responsibility is to create a cover. And then we'll be good to go and heading toward a release date. And there's nothing sweeter than that!
Until next time,
Happy Reading!
Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com
Thursday, August 23, 2012
How Many Sets of Eyes?
I was excited to get my galleys back earlier this week for An Unexpected Blessing.
I was not so excited to find quite a few errors after doing a couple of read throughs. I've looked at this manuscript dozens of times, not counting all of the time I spent writing it in the first place. My editor and I did two rounds of edits together on it. And it went to the copy edit department before going to production. That's a lot of eyes looking at it.
And still I found eight things that needed corrections. Some were simple errors like punctuation in the wrong place. Honestly, I can see missing things like this. An apostrophe or a period is so minute, it's easy to skim over. Some were usage errors. Is the word 'fissions' or 'frisson' or are those two different things? The really puzzling ones were places where words were missing. Or entire lines. In the case of an entire line missing, I checked the second round of edits I did and it was there then, so this was something in the translation from document to PDF galley
I know it's easy to get caught up in the story and jump over things like that. As the author, my mind knows what should be there, so sometimes I don't notice if it's missing. Which is why I always do a read through from front to back, and then another one from back to front. The latter tends to turn up things I miss when I am swept up in the story.
The good part of this is even though it's frustrating to still be finding those mistakes, I'm so glad to have the opportunity to find them. There's nothing worse than opening up a published copy of one of my novels and finding a mistake. Nothing I can do about it at that point. Now's the time to uncover them all and fix them.
Until next time,
Happy Reading!
Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com
I was not so excited to find quite a few errors after doing a couple of read throughs. I've looked at this manuscript dozens of times, not counting all of the time I spent writing it in the first place. My editor and I did two rounds of edits together on it. And it went to the copy edit department before going to production. That's a lot of eyes looking at it.
And still I found eight things that needed corrections. Some were simple errors like punctuation in the wrong place. Honestly, I can see missing things like this. An apostrophe or a period is so minute, it's easy to skim over. Some were usage errors. Is the word 'fissions' or 'frisson' or are those two different things? The really puzzling ones were places where words were missing. Or entire lines. In the case of an entire line missing, I checked the second round of edits I did and it was there then, so this was something in the translation from document to PDF galley
I know it's easy to get caught up in the story and jump over things like that. As the author, my mind knows what should be there, so sometimes I don't notice if it's missing. Which is why I always do a read through from front to back, and then another one from back to front. The latter tends to turn up things I miss when I am swept up in the story.
The good part of this is even though it's frustrating to still be finding those mistakes, I'm so glad to have the opportunity to find them. There's nothing worse than opening up a published copy of one of my novels and finding a mistake. Nothing I can do about it at that point. Now's the time to uncover them all and fix them.
Until next time,
Happy Reading!
Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com
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