Quality Counts

The manuscript for Once Upon A Project has been handled differently from those for past books. Usually, the manuscript has been edited by both the editor and the copyeditor by the time I get to see it. This time I received my editor's edits first, which were extremely sparse. At that time I went through the entire manuscript and made numerous corrections and improvements. It was refreshing to have taken a three-month break from it and look at it with a fresh outlook. This would, I felt, make the copyeditor's job easier.

The copyedited manuscript was delivered today, and I must say I am impressed. Not with myself, but with the copyeditor. Here I was thinking that I'd corrected all the errors in my text and he or she (in this case a he) would have an easy job of it. Not the case. He found loads of inconsistencies, contradictions, and timeline errors, ten pages worth, with quotes lifted directly from the manuscript to support his concerns. One or two of them can be easily explained (like Chicago's Blizzard of '67 occurring in January, before any of the girls turned 10, which is why they were 9 years old at the time despite a birth year of 1957). Some I outright disagree with (A past event that occurred 23 years before is correctly referred to in narrative, but I feel it's perfectly natural for people to refer to it in dialogue as "20 years" or "more than 20 years," rather than the correct "23 years," which strikes me as too exact to be realistic).

The great majority, however, are legitimate and require attention. For instance, I used the New York term, "D.A.'s office," when in Chicago they call it the "state's attorney's office." (But I did remember to call "soda," (a New York term), "pop" when these Midwesterners spoke!)

What's scarier, on the very first page I found a timeline that had been changed . . . incorrectly. I think we're all going to be confused before this is over.

My take? The publishing industry needs more thorough copyeditors like the gentleman who worked on my manuscript. If there were, the quality of books - which has been discussed on various forums in recent months - would shoot up like rockets. No more stories where decades conveniently vanish or with flimsily explained, implausible plot devices. Yes, it's going to be hard work for me to make these changes, and yes, I'm annoyed at myself for not catching most of these beforehand, but it took a lot of hard work for him to point out that what I said on pages 179, 195, 204, and 65 doesn't add up to the same thing . . . and again on pages 66, 207, 208, 242, 251, 281, 304, 305, 353, 354, and 360 . . . and again on - well, you get the point. Not to mention that damn lay vs. lie (I used it incorrectly on Page 1 and probably throughout the manuscript). It's excruciatingly tedious work. But the bottom line is, it will make for a much better book in the end when it's all cleared up.

And that's my #1 priority.