Editing, Editing, Editnig

Short one this week – way too much on my plate.

One of the pleasures of writing is obviously having others read and enjoy your work, but the greatest pleasure is knowing that you have a friend that has read the review copy and performed a final copyedit of the manuscript – in book proof form. I am finding, as any experienced author will tell you, that a manuscript is never done. But when it goes to press it has to be a perfect as it can be. And that is a very tough order.

My forthcoming O’Mara novel Diamonds For Death, was reread and edited maybe ten times before is went to a paid editor. She did an outstanding job and helped to clean up and clear up a number of issues. So far so good. Then I went through her track changes and revised accordingly—never click “accept all” in track changes—there are edits that must be looked at and fixed.

Then I formatted the book in InDesign for print and .doc for ebooks, I was sure I was at least 99% clean. My trusted beta readers then took hold (with Accent pen in hand) and went to work. OMG – they found twenty-three typos. Nothing big but missing a’s, multiple repeat words, confusing sentences, and one or two to’s with too many o’s. Done and done. Now all I’m waiting for is some input on Cuban baseball strike and ball calls (if anyone out there knows what an umpire calls strikes in Cuban Spanish please let me know), and comments on the Iraqi war scenes.

Diamonds For Death will publish this winter.

See you all at Boucheron in two weeks.

More later . . . . . . . . .