MY WEEKEND
Ah, my smugness has come to an end. I've been blessed with phenomenal editors and copyeditors. I have commiserated with other authors who had the edit from hell and have thanked God I have such great editors. But you know, the publishers hire outside copyeditors. Even Thomas Nelson does this. On Friday I had a sweet note from fabo editor Ami McConnell (she's a finalist for ACFW's Editor of the Year this year, BTW!) asking me to take a quick peek at some small issues left to fix before The Lightkeeper's Daughter went to print. Smiling, I opened the file. And began to read.

Can I just say I had my first copyeditor meltdown? I could click Accept All Changes when Erin Healy edits. I expected the same this time, but what I got was, well, very different. I'm sure this copyeditor thought she was helping me out. Changing some of those nasty saids, murmureds or whispereds to something more creative could only be good, right? Wrong. The first thing we learn as beginning writers is to NOT be creative with speaker attributes. The reader reads right over said or whispered or murmured with no problem. Said is the most innocuous but the others are okay too because they are how people actually talk. What is NOT okay are things like SHE PURRED. Or SHE GROANED, SHE SIGHED, SHE LAUGHED, SHE ARGUED. In other words you don't write, "Oh no you don't," Addie laughed. You could write "Oh no you don't," Addie said with a laugh. But laugh is not describing speech. When you do the weird attributes, that is writing that is TELLING not showing.

So I promptly fainted. When I came to, I discovered more horrors. She'd added adverbs. Now we writers know that adverbs are nasty creatures you use only when absolutely necessary. You don't EVER write JOHN SAID SADLY. Or HE SAID CENSORIOUSLY. Yet that was what I found in my manuscript. But the horrors mounted. SHE ADDED SEMICOLONS!! I nearly didn't survive that one. I dislike semicolons in my fiction. Some authors use them and love them. I'm not knocking those who do. But they are not for me and my fast paced fiction. I had to fan myself right away. She also inserted THAT where it wasn't needed and way too many commas but those were minor. I'm sooo thankful my editor wanted me to take a final look. If that had come to me in galleys, I might not have survived it.

Luckily, I've never before raised a ruckus at my house so when I had my meltdown, Natalie and Ami immediately believed me and apologized. Not that it was their fault. But I knew they trusted and believed me which went a long way to making me feel better. :-)

So now I know what it's like to have a bad copyedit. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? That's what I hear anyway. And it gave me a chance to reread the manuscript and realize all over again I still really like it. So it's all good!

DEATH TO SEMICOLONS!

Whew, got that off my chest. Do you have any pet peeves you see in books? Nothing WE do of course. We quite understand that. :-) So let's hear it!

Labels: adverbs, copyedit, semicolons