Christmas in April, New Book Covers, and Pet Words

Happy Monday morning! I'm late with this post because I was out of town yesterday. So to make up for it, let's be early and talk about Christmas. I got the galleys on my Shaker Christmas book last week. So I'm going to have to invite the snow and chill winter winds into my imagination for a few days as I work over the story. Here's a peek at the cover. Do you like it?

Have you ever wondered about the editing process a book goes through on its way out to the reader? First there are all my own edits before I decide I've done the best I can with the words telling my story. Then off it goes to the first editor who reads it and decides if I've written a story that readers might spend money to read. That editor might suggest major plot changes or improvements as well as more minor points to improve the story. Then once she or he approves the rewritten manuscript, the book will eventually go on to a copy editor who will look for all those little things that might be missed in the bigger edit. 

This editor makes sure I don't have the characters doing something on Friday and then going back to Thursday. Time lines can get confusing in a historical novel. This editor and the proofreaders make sure if your character sings a song or reads a book in your story that the song or book was actually written by the time of your book. I've made that mistake a few times. 

They also catch all the times you use a certain word too many times. I always, always have a pet word. I'll shove one of those words out in the cold and tell it that it can't be my "pet" anymore and another word will slide right in to take its place. So now I have a whole stable of "pet" words that I have to be careful to not like too much. What are some of them? Just. Still. Before. Of course. To name a few. Usually transition words of some sort that help me keep the words going. Nothing wrong with that in the first draft. You need to keep going in the first draft, but then I need to edit some of them out. Of course, I still like them just before I get out the red pen or hit the delete key. :) 

Then I sometimes have a sentence that runs along too long. Commas are always an issue too. Editors generally like commas more than I do. You wouldn't think an author would worry about a little added comma now and again, but sometimes we do. To our writing ears, a comma in the wrong (or perhaps right!) place messes everything up. Editors have to have the patience of saints at times. 

Once the galleys are worked over and the author and editor have "fixed" everything as well as they can, then there's still one more edit. This is called editing "the pages." Here a writer is more or less proofing the book to look for minor mistakes like typos or something that might have been missed in the previous edits. Not a good idea to make lots of changes at this stage. That's why I'll need to work through these galleys to make sure I change what needs changing now. 

It will be a while before Christmas at Harmony Hill will be ready for the store shelves. Its release date is September 15, my birthday. That's sort of neat. I'll have extra reason to celebrate. But before

that book comes out, Small Town Girl will be out in July. Both books are already available for pre-sale on the internet, so you can go ahead and order your copy.

So much fun to have new books coming out. This year has been especially busy for me with the re-release of Scent of Lilacs and looking forward to Orchard of Hope re-releasing in the fall. Then the two new books, Small Town Girl and Christmas at Harmony Hill, A Shaker Story, out too. Gives a whole new meaning to "so many books, so little time" for me. But it's fun to have new stories, and old ones too, out there for my reading friends.

I appreciate all of you who take time to read my journal. Thank you so much. So what do you think about the new book covers?

Editing Down to the Interesting Bits

"I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in." Sarah Vowell

I finished up the editing on the galleys of my Rosey Corner book, Small Town Girl, that will be released in July. Publishing a book with a traditional publisher is often a slow and exacting process. I know there are ways now that a writer can write a story and have it in front of the public in days. Maybe hours as they upload to the net and have the story available for download almost immediately. I've been told it's not even that hard once you get a few of the basics down. But I still prefer the traditional publishing route. I like that editors are double checking my stories and making sure my words make sense. Of course, conscientious writers can hire editors to make sure their work is polished before it goes live online. That's always a good idea.

So that's what I did last week. Polished. Corrected. Made my words easier on the readers' eyes. Gave the story a word by word look over to attempt to make it the best it can be. At least, that's the aim and with great editors it has a better chance of happening. Fresh eyes, eyes that haven't been living with the story and reading it over and over can very often note things that a writer misses. Have you ever typed something - a report, an e-mail, or maybe a Facebook comment - and think you've done it without error? You may have even proofed it, but then you hit the send button and all at once a glaring error pops out at you.

That's why it helps to work over the galleys to eliminate those glaring errors. I had one in this book. I changed the name of a character from one paragraph to the next. She was a minor character, but she definitely needed to keep the same name all through her few moments on screen! My copy editor didn't catch that either. But the good thing is that this isn't the final read through. Next out are the pages when the writer watches for typos and little errors. Can't make big changes at this stage, but a wrong name could be changed. Anyway, that's why it's good to dig into the galleys and make sure I've eliminated all the unnecessary words and only kept the interesting parts. You can see in the illustration that I did do some changing. I probably could find things to change until the cows come home, (if you're a farmer, you know getting the cows home isn't always easy.) But then no new stories would get written. So there comes a time when you send it back to the editors and hope you've fixed the things that needed fixing and didn't fix things that didn't need fixing.

With this story, I had my pet word as always. I have worn out a number of pet words. "Just" is still a favorite. And I do love "still." "Of course" popped up in my book before this one. But this time it was "before."  What's so wrong with "before?" I wondered that as well, but when you use it four or five times in two or three paragraphs, a pet word has surfaced. So I had to find ways to get rid of a lot of befores. I have found the delete key to be a great aid in editing.

"Editing is the same as quarreling with writers - same thing exactly." Harold Ross

Mr. Ross might be right about this for some books, but I never feel as if the editor and I are quarreling. Not most of the time, anyway. Instead we're working in tandem to make my book the best it can be. I like editors. I even like editing most of the time.

Remember I'll be drawing three winners in a couple of weeks for my blog giveaway. Enter by leaving a comment here or on Jocie's Hollyhill blog, www.hollyhillbookofthestrange.blogspot.com.  One entry per comment on different posts.

Watch for my newsletter. Hope to get one sent out next week with details about a giveaway to celebrate Scent of Lilacs being available again. Thinking something lilac color. If you're not signed up for the newsletter, that easy to do. Just go to my website and click on the newsletter link.

As always, thanks for reading.

Editing - Theirs and Mine - Part 2

All right, I admit it. This page is from way back when I used to write on the typewriter. Pre-computer days. The dark ages. But I kept this and used to carry it with me when I did school talks to demonstrate to the kids that editing is vital to making your story readable. I never did the cut and paste - the literal cut and paste - that some writers did prior to computers. I did circles and arrows. If you read Stephen King's On Writing you'll see some edited pages that he includes for examples of how he improves his stories. They look something like mine. This page is from one of my chapter books for kids that I wrote in the 1980's.

~~

Now, in some ways, editing is easier. At least physically with the computer. But in other ways it's harder because once you delete something it's gone unless you save a dozen copies. You can't peek back under your cross-out and see what you said first. I miss that paper trail, but I don't miss all the retyping, etc. So it is the computer age and we embrace it. Just don't hit the wrong key and erase everything. I have done that. Lost my work for this reason or that. Computers can die in mid-sentence, you know. I have never been able to re-write a scene from scratch that felt as good as I remember that first written scene being. Whether that's true or not, I'll never know because that first scene went out into dark reaches of never recover land.

~~

So in my last post I had gotten to the galleys and the copy-editor. That's what I'm doing now on my book, The Blessed, that will be out this summer. It's set in 1845. Today I came to the part of the story where I'd mentioned "Ring around the roses." My on-top-of-it editor put in a note that maybe it wasn't called ring around the roses or rosies until the mid 1800's. Kids sang it but where and how much and by what name. I did the safe edit. Cut it completely out after going out on the internet and not finding convincing proof that my character would have played ring around the roses by any name. Several years ago, I had a character in my Hollyhill books be an avid mystery story reader and had him reading John D. MacDonald. But MacDonald wasn't a popular author until several years after the time of my novel. My editor caught that too.

~~

Good editors are priceless. They let you know if your timeline is screwed up. Are you letting your character age in real time? They keep up with those pesky minor characters who might not be in the book but two times, but if you call the same character by two different names, you can depend on a sharp-eyed reader noticing. There are literally hundreds of little things you have to watch out for to keep your story right.Spelling correctly and being a good proofreader are just two of them. Of course you know you can't depend on spell check. It can help catch some errors, but not whether you've said your when you meant you're or their instead of there. Oh, by the way, sharp-eyed readers abound, and I'm glad they do. I want readers to be intent on my story. What I don't want is to jerk them out of the story with clumsy prose.

~~

So I've poured over the galleys, correcting everything the editor points out and all those things I see on my own during this new read through. It's probably been at least 6 months since I last reworked the story. That makes for fresh eyes to see sloppy writing that slipped past me in all my other edits. But I finally get it all read and to the end. I'm still not through.

~~

After a few more weeks, I get the pages. This is my final chance to catch something wrong. Here I am reminded by the editor to not see things I want to completely rewrite. Some changes are fine. Typos corrected. A transition here and there made clearer. A pet word replaced with something fresher and newer. But there's a warning that if I make too many changes - more than 10 percent or something like that - then I'll be charged for the addtional corrections that aren't publisher's errors. But that's okay. By this time, I as the writer should be happy with what's on the page in front of me. I've already rewritten it a dozen times. So I proofread this time very carefully, but I'm only looking for minor mistakes that are easily fixable. I don't skim over this editing phase. Too many times I've found mistakes. Once a whole paragraph had been inadvertently left out. A necessary paragraph. Lots of times there will be typos. And sometimes there are those minor problems with a repetitive word or a lazy word that just slipped by me all those other editing times. Those things can still be fixed. Once more I read all the way through. Once more I get to the end.

~~

By this time I've practically memorized the story, but I'm not really sick of it. I'm anxious for it to go to the next step. I've already seen the cover. The title has been chosen. It may even already be out there on Amazon.com or Christianbook.com or BarnesandNoble.com for pre-sale. But my part is finished. At least the writing and editing part. The next time I see my story it will be in a book. One of those great editors who patiently worked over my book to make it the best it could be will send me a copy by rush delivery. That's always an exciting moment. Holding that finished book. Hoping readers are going to like it. Seeing the back cover. By the way, the back cover of my new release, Angel Sister is great with a picture of Kate and Lorena playing. Maybe ring around the rosies.

~~

At this point, a lot of writers sit down and read through their book again just to make sure everything's the way it's supposed to be. I admit that I have never done that. But for my last book, I should have because even with all our careful edits, one rewritten transition sentence didn't make it into the final copy for printing. A few months after the book came out, one of those sharp-eyed readers asked me how come my characters were in one place one paragraph and in another place the next paragraph. A sentence had been accidently omitted. My editor fixed it for the next print run if there's another print run, but it really bothers me that all those books are out there with that scene looking like I wasn't a careful writer or proofreader. But those things happen. Other writers have said that whole sections were accidently left out or put in the wrong place. That happened to a few of those last books of mine too. A printing mistake that left out forty pages or so. Some readers let me know about that too. The point is mistakes happen even when everybody works hard to keep them from happening. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to keep them from happening by editing as carefully and as completely as we can.

~~

As I said in the first post - my aim is to make my writing smooth enough that the words disappear on the page and nothing, absolutely nothing is left but the movie playing in the reader's imagination. It takes two to bring a story to life. The writer and the reader. Thanks so much for being a reader. Oh yeah, and by the way, I may talk about the comma in my next post. Maybe it will be Editing 3 - How can one little squiggle of a mark cause so much trouble?

~~

Thanks for your comments. And tune in Sunday. Besides the comma thing, I hope to announce a prize giveaway to celebrate the release of Angel Sister.

Getting Back in Gear

It's been a strange winter for writing. You'd think winter time would be the best time for writing. No sunshine to beckon you outdoors to put your hands in the dirt and plant something. No Spring Fever to make you want to go fishing or clean something like windows. Unfortunately those are two fevers I never get. I've been fishing once in my life when I was in seventh grade for a school outing. I didn't like it. And I would always rather do something else than clean. I like having cleaned. Just not the actual cleaning.

That's a quote I read once from another author. That he or she liked to have written, but not the actual writing. I'm afraid I was in that uncomfortable position today. I had to take some time out of writing to babysit the grandbabies and then the galleys for my next book, The Believer, came in and while there weren't many queries, there were enough to keep me busy for a week. I always want to read the manuscript over again and make the words flow as smoothly as I can. I hate reading back over something I've written that's already published and seeing sloppy writing that I didn't catch in the editing process. So I try to edit and read carefully to catch most of the rough spots or mistakes.

I read a book the other day where the writer changed the person's name from one paragraph to the next on the same page. Now somebody didn't do their homework on that one. I've messed up on names a hundred pages apart which is why I keep a character list of all the named characters in my books as I'm writing. Most of the time a good copyeditor or a careful proofreading writer can catch the changeable name kind of mistake or at least they should. In this book, The Believer, I had one of my characters bald early on and then in a later scene, I had someone brushing the hair back off his forehead. I hadn't given him a comb-over either! I did catch that, thank goodness. And no, it wasn't the hero. Does anybody ever write a novel with a bald hero if he isn't a hard-boiled detective or private eye? Perhaps I should consider it. I'm always looking for ways to stretch my ideas into new territory. That's probably why I've got several unsold manuscripts filling up some shelves in my closet. Readers like what they like and I'm not sure that would include a romantic going bald hero.

But anyway, back to the hard writing today. I had been away from it too long, I think. I couldn't seem to pick up the thread for the next scene. I'm not sure I've done it yet, but I did finally get some words written that I didn't delete immediately. Sometimes I know where I want to go with a story but I'm not sure how I'm going to get there. There are times when that happens that I need to not worry about the trip and just go through the door and be there. Maybe that's what I need to do now. Just plop my characters down where I want them to be and then figure it out. But then what if they aren't quite ready to be there? There are times characters just don't cooperate if they're not ready. And sometimes, to the relief of many writers, the characters are readier for action after a good night's sleep. I hope my subconscious works hard all night long.

And I did get the galleys done and off in the mail. That's to the good. I'm just hoping and praying I don't catch the horrible cold that has my husband dragging around the house. And worse there's a terrible stomach virus going around town. Sounds like a good time to hole up and not go out among the germs except Darrell's already brought the cold germs inside. Oh well, that seems to be part of winter too. A part I hope all of you have missed.

Stay well and keep the winter evenings interesting by reading some good books.