Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Sunborn Copyedit Finished

For the last seven or eight days, I have been up to my ears in Sunborn again. The copyedited manuscript arrived for my review, and as usual, they wanted it done yesterday. In case you're not familiar with the process, when a book manuscript goes into production, after it's left the editor's hands, it goes to a copy editor. This person does all the fine marking up for typesetting, plus proofing of all the fiddly little details, querying the author if something seems wrong or unclear, and checking spelling, hyphenations, commas, all the little stuff that can drive you crazy—and make the book look unprofessional if it's missed or done wrong. Copy editors are absolutely essential to the bookmaking process, and a good copy editor is priceless to an author.

The problem is that the author then has to go over everything, approving or not approving of changes, and reconsidering every little comma and word choice, pulling his or her hair out over things that he thought (ha ha) had already been settled. It's also a chance to make last-minute revisions if a passage doesn't seem right. It's my least favorite stage of writing a book, it's excruciating, and it's necessary to do it with great care. Usually by the time you get to this point, you're sick to death of the book and the last thing you want to do is read it one more time. But you do. For one thing, even the best copy editor will make some changes you don't like, and this is where you catch them and fix them.

Anyway, I did all that, and have just shipped it off to my editor. Now it goes back to the production department and off to typesetting. I'll have to do it all one more time—when the page proofs come for checking. But for now, I can rest. Sleeeeeeep!

"You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word." —Gustave Flaubert

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3 Comments:

At 8:40 AM, Blogger Charlza said...

You're still in the home stretch :) You know we're still going to eat it up when it gets in a hands.

I've been in the IT administrator for a University Press for 5 years and most of the process is still a mystery to me. I should really start asking questions to see how the process works.

 
At 10:36 PM, Blogger substandardTim said...

http://www.instructables.com/id/Turn-Old-Pallets-Into-A-Chicken-Tractor/

I thought you might be able to build on this idea with one of your Roombas. On the last page the guy suggests the possibility of doing it.

 
At 2:36 AM, Blogger Jeffrey A. Carver said...

Very strange video. Hm.

Funny you should post that comment about Roombas on the day I decided to take apart a Scooba that wasn't working right. In an attempt to diagnose the problem, I soldered a couple of wires to the innards, and led them outside to a voltmeter that rode around on the Scooba's back as it mopped our floor. My hookup of the voltmeter worked just fine--except that the Scooba also worked fine. (It wasn't supposed to; it was supposed to malfunction, and then I would look at the voltmeter to see what was happening.) It's not easy doing serious science, when things refuse to cooperate and don't malfunction when they're supposed to!

 

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