Under the gun with my WIP

Don’t you love the pressure of a deadline? There’s something about D-Day that gets my blood pumping. How about you?

I haven’t been blogging much; well, other than those few random things that didn’t take much thought. I am feverishly working on the final edit of an author’s manuscript. Tomorrow I plan to dump the manuscript into its book layout, and this project is out of here!

I’m hoping that the gremlins that invaded the manuscript don’t invade the layout. Seriously, I found some very naughty gremlins in this project!!! Things (aka mistakes) that I know weren’t there before are there now. Hmmm…definitely gremlins. Every manuscript I work with goes through 3 to 4 stages: Stage 1 = first read, return to author with queries; Stage 2 = second read, review author’s changes, return to author for approval; Stage 3 = another read, not always necessary depending on the original condition of the manuscript, return to author; Stage 4 = Approve minor changes from Stage 3, dump into book format).

I usually do 90% of my editing on-screen. It’s so much faster since I don’t have to do the edits on paper and then transfer them to the computer. When I first started working with this manuscript months ago, I did start with what I call a “paper edit” – all done on paper. However, there were some extensive rewrites, and after working with the first chapter, it seemed more feasible to work on-screen. I probably should have done a paper edit in stage 2, but I stuck with the on-screen process for this particular book since stage 2 was still a little rough with a lot of changes.

Tuesday evening – wrapping up Stage 3 and rapidly approaching Stage 4, I printed out a chapter to take with me since I would have some downtime while playing bingo (yes, bingo – my husband and his mother used to play a lot years ago, so they wanted to go last week. I tagged along and surprisingly, my DH won the jackpot game. We sorta felt obligated to go back this week. ) Anyway, I am so thankful I printed out that chapter! Somewhere between stages 2 and 3, something happened. I know I have an eye for punctuation and grammatical problems, but that printout definitely didn’t show it! I found random commas, misspellings, odd punctuation, huge inconsistencies…My plans were to dump the book into layout on Wednesday, but seeing those 20 pages persuaded me otherwise! Now I’m trying to finish 272 pages before tomorrow. Guess I shouldn’t be blogging, huh?