Daynote - Tue 25 Aug

A nice day in town yesterday, I popped into Toppings on my lunch break and signed some copies.

It was a long day as I visited family afterwards, so I got to bed a bit late - hence a little bit of a lie-in this morning. But I got some editing on the train home, so I'll call it an overall win.

ON DECK: Up to page 244 this morning, making very good progress. As predicted I'm picking up speed in the second half of the book. Still making a lot of line edits as I go - if all I was doing was addressing editorial comments I'd be done in a couple of hours, but this is the last chance for a wholesale revision.

TOOLS AND PROCESS: It's probably worth talking about the stages of editing in trade publishing. There's usually four distinct phases, which are structural edits, line edits, copy edits and proofing. If you produce reasonably structurally sound drafts, editors will sometimes combine the first and second stages, which are to fix big problems and then make small tweaks, respectively. That's where I am with this book, which is hanging together well at the chapter level. I have structural notes, but they're along the lines of 'give me more of this and a bit less of this' rather than 'rewrite the middle third of the book'. So, mostly, I'm working through the line edits while applying the broader editorial feedback I got in my edit letter.

I do that by making myself an edit task list. In this case, I'm also incorporating feedback from two of my critique partners who read the same draft as my editor (I briefly chatted through their notes with my editor to make sure there were no conflicts).

I'm also doing a line edit for myself, re-reading the whole book line-by-line and just... polishing things up a bit. I need the distance of a few weeks from the drafting process to be able to do that. There's a lot of cutting and trimming and taking out over-blocking and passive phrasing and all the other stuff that tends to survive my first round of edits. I can do some of this in the copy edit stage, because I'm generally making lots of little tweaks anyway, but I like to try and give the copy editor a nice clean manuscript if I can. Copy editors do a different job to my editor - they are checking for style and consistency and continuity and a million other small things. Memorably, my copy editor for the last two books, Sarah Day, literally counted the gunshots in the finale of SOLITARY AGENTS because multiple character POVs were hearing them from different places. She caught three or four mistakes I'd made in the process. Good copy editors are worth their absolute weight in gold.

Copy edits and proofs will be a month or two down the line from the current stage, but generally need to be turned around pretty quickly by me, so this is the best place for me to do substantial polish. And by the time we get to proofing, the whole thing has been typeset, so you really don't want to be chopping lots and lots of words or making changes that substantially move paragraphs or lines or page breaks.

Have I mentioned how much I love the sheer mechanics of publishing books? I love this shit.

LISTENING: I discovered a new Apple Music playlist the other day, which turns out to be good for both running really fast and editing a novel. If you like high-BPM electronica, check out the Loops playlist.

WATCHING: Didn't watch anything yesterday, I was in town until late. A bit of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON tonight though, I think.

READING: A tiny bit of CRY PILOT by Joel Dane - (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) when I got home yesterday, but most of my reading yesterday was clearing unread newsletters and Instapaper articles while sitting on buses and trains.

LINK: I've queued up this video from FanFiAddict with m'friend and crit partner Nick Binge all about his SF work (and specifically his new novella ABYSS) for later on.

UP NEXT: You guessed it, more edits. But I'm well over the halfway mark now and feeling good about this week's work. If I have another barnstormer on Friday I may even get to the end. My editor very helpfully sent me a list of crutch/repeating words and phrases he'd noticed (hi Toby!) so I'll be doing a good comb through the document for those. But between now and then, I'm just going for steady progress.

Can't believe August is nearly over? This year is disappearing fast.

Onward!