Final Editing

Joyce, a friend that went to my high school, edits documents at her work and offered to edit Infused. I gladly accepted her offer since I knew that I was not a master of punctuation – I like to use hyphens, parentheses and ellipsis quite a bit. After my experience with the writing seminars, I was not in a rush to do anything more with my book, but I certainly was not going to turn down an offer by someone to help.

Since it was a volunteer job, and Joyce had a lot of things going on in her life, it took her a number of months to edit the book. I think that it was a bigger project than she had expected (it is after all about 90,000 words long) – she had read the book beforehand, but since she was conforming to the formatting commonly used for sci-fi/fantasy, she ended up having to make a great deal of changes. Many of the changes were swapping  out my medium sized hyphens to larger hyphens and removing the spaces before and after them, and putting spaces between the periods in the ellipsis, but there were many more changes too of course.

After I received the results of the editing, I let them sit for a couple of more months because I was still very pessimistic from listening to other authors. Then I finally started to slowly work through the changes.

I had sent Joyce a Word document with the novel in it and she returned that file with all of the proposed changes marked in it. Word has a nice feature that lets me accept or reject each change. Most of the punctuation changes I accepted easily (although I left some of the parenthesis as I felt that they worked better than the alternative is several places).

There were also a number of places that she pointed out awkward phrasing and performed some word-smithing. These I didn’t accept en masse. I agreed with the fact that the original wording in most of these places could use improvement, but I very often did not agree with the suggested changes. A few times I felt that the proposed change did not sound like something that I would write, so I crafted my own replacement so that the change would not stick out because it didn’t flow with the rest of the writing. Other times, the suggested changes were actually changing what was being said. This surprised me a bit until I thought about the fact that she was editing sentence by sentence, she was not intimately familiar with the story. An example of this would be where I have a character use a word that does not exist, and then a couple of sentences later I make a remark about how he was able to get away with using the word without anyone noticing. However, since Joyce was only looking at the individual sentences, she simply replaced the made up word with a real word.

I was very glad that Joyce had identified the locations of the awkward sentences, but I felt the need to make the changes with my own style of writing. Editing never ends – I’ve been informed of a few errors since the book was published. Don’t blame Joyce for letting any slip by though – I made changes that she never saw, and it can sometimes be difficult to tell exactly what the corrected version of the text will be when viewing it in Word with changes marked. After this experience I won’t be as annoyed when I find a mistake in a book that I am reading.

I have heard tales of authors rearranging large portions of their books, or of them re-writing it over several times. I did not do this. My editing changes were either grammar related, or to add a little more detail. The story was told (for the most part) in a very logical flow and I can’t think of any re-arranging that I would be happy with making.