I am comforted today by the fact that I’ve used the word “the” 5441 times in a A Gift of Time. Although I suppose some of those occurrences could be in words like “theater” or “theme,” it still makes me feel so much better about the 91 uses of “just,” each and every one of which I have looked at and determined is worth keeping.

Today’s goals: less ambitious than yesterday. I got nowhere close to a whole pass. Too many things that warranted revision, thinking about, cross-checking, etc. So, two chapters this morning before yoga, four chapters this afternoon before my evening meeting. That’ll put me halfway through my copy-edit. Tomorrow I’ll try to finish, and Saturday I’ll start an actual proofing pass. With any luck, I’ll be done by Sunday. Later than I hoped, but that’s sort of been the way of things with this book all the way along. Why should it change during the end game?

One of the hardest lessons I had to learn as a working editor was that perfection is not possible. There’s no such thing and the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t make any sense. As an editor, you have to make choices about what you can accomplish in your available time. Smart choices. Ones that make your pay rate something you can live with and on. Doing it all myself makes those choices so much harder and less clear.

I am completely hyphen incompetent. I never knew that before. And I long to hyphenate hyphen-incompetent. Doesn’t it look better that way? Isn’t it easier to read and understand?

“Trying to” — why do all my characters try to do things? Can’t they sometimes just DO the thing? And speaking of that, what is my obsession with the word “just”? Do I really need to use it five times a chapter?

Editing is… ongoing. All of my quotation marks, both single and double, point in the right directions. My em dashes are actual em dashes and not double hyphens. Only one of my characters ever uses a dry voice and only one ever has a wry smile.

But I am only on the 5th chapter and my frustration level is rising. Lots of people liked the story, I remind myself. But when I edit, every perfectionist instinct I have kicks into over-drive. Gah. Should overdrive be hyphenated? Over-drive, overdrive… if this was a book, I’d spend at least a couple minutes looking it up and reading definitions. Fortunately, it’s a blog post. But I did backtrack there to delete “just” as in “just a blog post.”

My wrists are tired. I’m usually good about taking breaks, because I’ve seen people with bad carpal tunnel syndrome and no, thank you, not interested in doing that to myself. But it’s been a long couple of days. And as soon as my iPad gets enough charge that I can keep reading, I’ll get back to it.

It’s so close that I can taste it. The day I post Time on Amazon, I’m getting sushi for dinner. I don’t care that I can’t afford it. I’m doing it anyway. Meanwhile, I had no idea that “anymore” was a colloquialism. Live and learn.

I started my proofing pass yesterday and nope. Two chapters in, I went back to copy-editing.

What’s the difference, you ask? (Okay, I imagine you asking.) When I’m copy-editing, I’ll make substantive changes. I’ll decide that an entire paragraph is unnecessary or that sentences need tightening. I’ll reword phrases that seem awkward. I’ll make global decisions about word choices. I’ll do dialog passes where I look at the word choices of an individual character and make sure that all my characters don’t sound the same.

A proofing pass, on the other hand, is for minor errors. Misplaced commas, extra spaces, spelling errors. I proof by reading aloud. It’s time-consuming and hard on the voice and when I’m done, I want the changes to be so small that I don’t feel like I have to do it again. If I make any change larger than a single letter, I’m likely to re-read the whole chapter with the change aloud again, in order to make sure that my change doesn’t cause a ripple effect with repetitions or logical issues.

So yesterday I started reading aloud and within the first two chapters, I’d already made about twenty changes, including some that were major (deleting entire paragraphs that bored me) and some that were global. Gray vs grey, anyone?

Today, therefore, it’s back to copy-editing. My goal: to finish one solid pass, make some more big changes, and maybe manage to get in a couple of hours of reading aloud before bedtime. I suspect it’s going to be another long, long day.

Some of yesterday’s catches:

“kind of” vs “sort of” vs “type of”. They really don’t all mean the same thing.

The aforementioned “gray” vs “grey”. One’s American, one belongs to the rest of the English-speaking world. Which to use?

“A little” — 94 times! I used “a little” 94 times. I’m down to 34 today and I think I can probably live with that. And it’s definitely added to my stylesheet to check on in future books.

I finally finished the major revisions to A Gift of Time. I ran through all of my stylesheet questions and edit notes and reviewed all of my beta comments again.

This means I’m ready to start proofing. Whee!

Well, not quite. I need to add a title page and copyright page, plus acknowledgements and dedication. Plus the author note (aka call to action) which I just hate writing. I get the reasoning for it — my mailing list currently has eight people on it which is not exactly enough to sustain a career. But still, I hate asking people to do things. I should probably work on that in therapy someday. Ha.

Beyond that, I’ve also decided that books should include their description on the front page, right below the title, right above the copyright. I say this because I’m tired of trying to guess what books are about from their cover in my ereader software. So it’s time to work on the description.

The current version is: Natalya Latimer’s ability to see the future has been as much curse as gift. Knowing that she would someday find his dead body destroyed her relationship with her best friend and lover. But when it finally happens, nothing turns out the way she expected it to and suddenly she’s flying blind, with no gift to tell her where she’s going.

Thoughts? It doesn’t reveal a lot about the story, but I might be okay with that.

Well, not literally serious. Serious is death and divorce and illness and all the myriad struggles of life. This is more like, “Ugh, I have to do something with this and I just don’t want to.”

So Chapter Ten… the right thing to do is to start over. Maybe not completely, but pretty close. Originally, it was a scene with three major characters. I revised it once already and got rid of one of those characters, because his presence made plot complications that I did not need. But my revisions were patchwork. The reality is that his absence means that the scene can and should be dramatically different. The conversation that Akira is having isn’t the right conversation for her to be having with Colin. It’s the right conversation for her to be having with Zane. Instead of it being an interaction between two people who know each other intimately, this is an interaction between two people who barely know each other but are predisposed to like one another, and, even more importantly, strongly suspect that they might or should someday become sort of relatives. In-law in-laws–the “my brother-in-law’s wife” relationship. It’s an entirely different conversation.

And I can see that. But ugh. I just haven’t felt inspired to write it.

I need to remind myself that writing isn’t about inspiration, it’s about putting the words one after another on the screen until the magic number is reached. At the moment, though, I seem to be searching for inspiration.

…and ready to make some fresh starts.

Well, not quite ready. Or perhaps not quite fresh starts. I’ve finished one round of edits on A Gift of Time. Mostly, it was the easy stuff: the simple notes that I and some of my beta readers made while reading. Sentence tweaks, punctuation changes, word fixes, a few line edits, and some minor revisions to fix continuity issues or small plot holes.

I still need to rewrite Chapter Ten. Also I need to review one of the earlier chapters to see how and if I can implement a substantial change. Then I’ll go through most of my beta reads again. I’ve got ten or so, some with substantial comments. I have a tendency on my first review of set of beta notes to reject some comments that on a second review make me think, “well, maybe…” So I’ll do that. Then I’ll start the copy-edit. I need to go back and dig up my last style-sheet, from A Gift of Thought. It’s basically a list of words to check: I look at every “that,” every “ly,” every “was,” plus a whole bunch more (just, actually, some, a little, quite), and decide if they’re needed, if they could be replaced, if I could find a better way to say what I was trying to say. Hmm, planning out what I’m going to do is making me tired. I think I’d better stop planning it and just start doing it!

Onto Chapter 10. And back, I hope, to my daily posting here. It may not work for everyone, but the daily posting helps me stay focused in a good way.

Goals for today: work on 10. Probably not finish it, because I’m jet-lagged and in the wrong time zone, which isn’t the most conducive state of mind for writing coherently, much less well. But at least make some initial attempts at finalizing it.

First day home after ten days in Seattle. I have both back doors wide open and from where I’m sitting, I can see two dogs lying in the sun. Oops, one noticed me, and decided to wander my way. Small break for dog petting…

It is good, good, good to be home. I need to unpack, I need to vacuum, I need to do laundry and I need to go grocery shopping, but for the moment, all I want to do is enjoy the humidity and the sounds of the outside world. 67% humidity and 78 degrees (or 26 Celsius), so it feels positively tropical.

Seattle is a dark city in the winter. I never thought much about latitude & longitude, but Florida is far enough south that the days are reasonably long even in the darkest part of the year. Seattle got dark before 5PM and stayed dark after 7AM. But the darkness made the holiday lights around Ballard sparkle all the brighter: they were so much prettier and more festive than the same lights here.

As most vacations are wont to be, it was both good and bad. The good I’d like to remember: waking up with Pam and Samara and Charlie for half an hour of giggling before getting out of bed; making books and stories with Samara and Jill; decorating the Christmas tree and discovering that some of the ornaments were made by preschooler R; listening to R and P watch The Walking Dead; going thrift store shopping with R; fun with cooking and grocery shopping, including the days spent cooking Thanksgiving dinner; talking to strangers in airports. The bad I’m just going to forget.

I’ve finished the first round of edits on A Gift of Time. Today’s goal: to tackle Chapter 10. Or, alternatively, to call it a recovery day, do some useful house stuff, and spend a lot of time snuggling with my dogs. It’s almost 11 and I could already really use a nap.

I’ve taken my own advice and rewritten one of my book descriptions.

The current description is:

For Dillon Latimer, meeting his long-lost mother comes too late. He’s been a ghost for five years. Still, a little thing like death won’t get in Dillon’s way when he decides his mom’s life needs improving.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy for ghosts to influence the material world, especially when every choice Sylvie makes brings her deeper and deeper into danger.

Sylvie Blair ran away for reasons that seemed right at the time but she’s never let go of the past. When it comes back to haunt her—literally—she’s forced to face her regrets, even as she tries to decide whether to believe her high school sweetheart’s crazy stories about ghosts and drug cartels.

Can Sylvie let go of the past and embrace the future?

And can Dillon keep his mom alive long enough for her to live happily ever after with his dad?

New description:

At seventeen, Sylvie Blair left her infant son with his grandparents while she went shopping. She never came back.

Twenty years later, she’s devastated to learn of his early, untimely death. But although Dillon’s body is long since buried, his spirit lingers on.

And he’s not real happy.

He doesn’t like his mom’s job—too dangerous. He doesn’t like her apartment—too boring. And he definitely doesn’t like her love life—non-existent.

But when Dillon decides that his parents should be living happily ever after, he sets them on a path that leads deeper and deeper into danger.

Can Sylvie let go of the past and embrace the future?

And can Dillon survive the deadly energy he unwittingly unleashes?

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Any feedback? Typos? Confusing sentences (beyond the natural confusion)? Opinions or revision suggestions?

Thanks for any help!