Will you walk with me out on the wire?

So in the past, I haven't been so great at this blogging thing. And every so often I come back and say, "Hey, I'm totally committing myself to this now!" and set a goal which I almost immediately break.

But really. I'm going to blog more. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.

Today's topic: Copy edits.

Copy edits, for me, were about the third round of revisions I've gone through for SAVING JUNE (since it was sold, anyway). My first round of edits came from the editorial letter and had to do with general story elements. That round led to a 20,000 word increase on the novel. The second round was line edits, which entailed my editor going through and pointing out continuity issues within the text. And then the copy edits! For this, I was mailed with a marked-up hard copy of the manuscript.



I consider myself to be pretty good at grammar, but there were a fair amount of mark-ups throughout the manuscript. Some pages had none, some had a lot, and some of the symbols used to indicate corrections took some deciphering before I could tell what they meant (but I managed!). I went through page by page to make sure I agreed with all of the proposed changes, and kept a list of the ones I wasn't sure about (spoiler alert: it was all but unnecessary since my copy editor was right about everything!), and at the end emailed my editor my approval/questions rather than mail the whole manuscript back. Quick and easy!

So I'm almost finished with SAVING JUNE entirely-- I will be looking at it again for a final proofread soon, but after that, I should be done! Yay! In the words of Kanye West: #itsaprocess