Galley a Go Go

Debra is one step closer to finishing the final stretch of things to do on One Great Night.

Over the weekend I received the galley files for One Great Night from my editor. I was a little surprised, because I thought I'd be seeing the project in pre-galley format first, but I guess we skipped that step. Now's the time for looking at minute mistakes: misspellings, grammatical errors, misplaced punctuation, etc. Essentially line edits. It's not the time for changing anything about the story or even rephrasing lines or substituting words.

It's exciting and scary all at the same time. It's exciting because a galley is almost the last step before getting a release date. (I'm still waiting on a cover, too.) It's a bit scary because the time for tweaking and changing has passed. The story won't be changing...even in a small way...at this point. It is what it is.

Because of that, I approach this step of editing in a different way. Instead of reading from the beginning to the end, I read from the end to the beginning. I start with the last page. This way, my mind is not wrapped up in the story, and those pesky errors I mentioned tend to stand out more. Another way to do it is to read all of the odd pages and then all of the evens. Anything that breaks the flow of narrative.

I think no matter what the stage, everyone has their own system for editing. I've been to lots of sectionals and heard lots of presentations on it, but it really all comes down to finding what works for you. Writing is a very personal thing. Even in the editing stage.

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com

Is There Such a Thing as a Final Edit?

This morning I completed my edits on the galley for This Feels Like Home. This time through, we weren't looking for editing choices, but formatting and other errors. Even at this stage of the game, the mss has been through several other rounds of edits, I found a few mistakes. That always amazes me, because it seems like no matter how many sets of 'eyes' look at a mss, it never seems to be enough. I feel fortunate that my books go through many rounds of edits with my editor at TWRP. With Home, not only did it go through the regular round of edits, it also went through several rounds of revisions before being offered a contract. And of course before I even submitted it, I went through it several times with a fine tooth come. But, no matter how fine the teeth, something always seems to get through.

For each round of the official, post-contract edits, we look for different things, so perhaps that's what gets in the way of finding those lingering pesky errors. In the first round, in addition to correcting typos and such we were also making changes to phrasing and story continuity. The second round was a bit more of the same. Both of these rounds are done with the 'track changes' feature in Word, so perhaps that's why some of the misspellings and incorrect punctuation slip through. It's sometimes difficult to see those kinds of mistakes with all of the strike-throughs and comments on the page as well.

After that we got to the pre-galley stage. Here we were focused on mainly spelling and usage errors, but if I really, really wanted to edit/revise something, I could, so long as those types of changes were kept to a minimum. In the galley stage it was strictly for errors. No revising allowed. I found an extra set of quotation marks around some dialogue, the word glace instead of glance, a blank line, and two places where italics should have been used but hadn't been. Now the italics should have been fixed in the pre-galley and weren't, but no biggie. And the blank line was simply a formatting issue. But the misused word and the extra punctuation...how in the world had those been missed when I've looked at the mss a million times, my editor has looked at the mss a million times, and the copy edit department had a read-through?

And of course I found places where I wanted to change something, but knew at this stage that I couldn't. At this point, the story is told and nothing about that is going to change. This happens with every story, right? Eventually you just need to let it go and send it out into the world. If we were allowed to, I think we'd keep editing and revising and editing and revising forever...and then no one would ever get to read our books. And wouldn't that be a sad state of affairs?! :)

My editor thanked me for taking the time to go through the mss so thoroughly again. The next step will be to send it to production for the PDF of the final release format (There may or may not be an approval step in there.) and a release date. Yippie! (The galley showed a copyright of 2014, so I'm guessing early next year.) I know I'll be tempted to look through that ready-to-be-published copy when I get it, and I'm sure I'd find a few errors that were missed. But, at that point it will be too late to do anything about it. If there are mistakes, I guess I have to chalk it up to everyone's human and everyone makes mistakes. And I know for a fact my book won't be the only one out there with errors. I'll just have to grimace and bear it when I do my first read-through of the book when I have the paperback in my eager little hands!

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com