{"id":643,"date":"2010-12-07T11:22:59","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T16:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=643"},"modified":"2011-04-22T09:48:28","modified_gmt":"2011-04-22T13:48:28","slug":"behind-the-scenes-copyedits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/behind-the-scenes-copyedits\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the Scenes: Copyedits"},"content":{"rendered":"

I received my copyedits for Prized<\/em> two weeks ago, along with marginalia from my editor.<\/p>\n

\"\"

A.Copyedits and Marginalia<\/p><\/div>\n

We work with the Track Changes feature of Word at this point, and when I first received the manuscript, I shrank down the pages to get a general idea of how many comments I\u2019d be dealing with (see Photo A).\u00a0 The purple comments from Jill Freshney, the managing editor, have to do with formatting, so I largely ignore those. The green ones are from Suzette Costello, the copyeditor who, incidentally, also did the copyediting for Birthmarked<\/em> and remembers things like Gaia\u2019s customary gesture with her hair and points out where she\u2019d be likely to do it again.\u00a0 Amazing.\u00a0 Suzette catches things like when I turn a cloak into a shawl, put a space in \u201canymore,\u201d mix up the names of players on my teams, or say \u201cboys turn into girls\u201d when I really mean \u201cgirls turn into boys.\u201d\u00a0 She\u2019s a mind reader with a very precise eye.\u00a0 Her suggestions take little soul searching for me, and I almost always accept them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

B. Notes Up Close<\/p><\/div>\n

The aqua comments are from Nan Mercado, my editor, and these are substantive. Though Nan and I have been discussing drafts of the novel since March, this is the first chance we\u2019ve had for line-by-line feedback, and reading her notes in the margins is like having an extra voice along in my mind while I\u2019m writing, a friend who pauses to call attention when anything could be clearer. She might say, \u201cThis line seems slightly out of character for the narration, no? It\u2019s a direct statement about how Gaia is, instead of her state of mind at the moment,\u201d or \u201cI like how this will be echoed later in the scene with cadaver, but I\u2019m not sure I believe that she would examine a corpse in this moment. She was so weak, why would that occur to her?\u201d They tend to be open-ended questions that I could solve in any number of ways, and there are very few I disregard. Even then, I consider carefully before I make no change.<\/p>\n

As I go, I keep in mind the broader comments Nan included in her accompanying letter, with feedback from her intern, too. Stacy Herman hasn\u2019t read Birthmarked<\/em>, so her fresh perspective helps me think about what might be missing for readers who come to Prized<\/em> having no familiarity with the back-story.\u00a0 Explaining old business requires a delicate balance because I dread boring returning readers with repetition, but I don\u2019t want new readers lost.<\/p>\n

The last thing I consider is another draft of my own that I kept revising while the book was ostensibly out of my hands. You can see it in the background of the screen (see Photo B). That tinkering gets merged into this draft, too, and I need to make sure it is scrupulously clean because the book is now post-copyedits. How awful it would be to throw in extra errors at this point.<\/p>\n

\"\"

C. After Folding in Copyedits, etc.<\/p><\/div>\n


<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what the manuscript looks like once I\u2019ve made my changes (see Photo C).\u00a0 You maybe can\u2019t see it, but the red indicates new changes in the text, and I deleted the comments from the margins as I went, leaving only a few that I\u2019m still pondering.\u00a0 I have about sixty pages left to go, so I\u2019ll be done in a couple days, but I\u2019d like to take one more chance to read through the whole thing at normal speed, just to make sure it all works.<\/p>\n

In case you can’t tell: I love this part of the process. \u00a0I could not do it without Jill, Suzette, Nan and Stacy.\u00a0 Never think my novel is the work of one person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I received my copyedits for Prized two weeks ago, along with marginalia from my editor. We work with the Track Changes feature of Word at this point, and when I first received the manuscript, I shrank down the pages to get a general idea of how many comments I\u2019d be dealing with (see Photo A).\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,3],"tags":[68,17,37],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prized","category-writing","tag-behind-the-scenes","tag-prized-2","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":923,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions\/923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}