Got the copyedit through from the litpixies at Orbit, and as always eye-openers come thick and fast. With emphasis on the word thick. Just goes to show – you really do need other eyes to look over that great mound of words and make sure that infelicities are hounded to their lairs and dragged out into the pitiless glare of daylight. To be sure, a lot of the necessary corrections are of the inexplicable words type, requiring clarification; occasionally, however, weird sentences turn up where clearly several words have just vanished, leaving the copy editor going ‘Wuh?’ Luckily, I still have my original longhand draft to refer to – and I was on the point of trashing it too. Mebbe I should keep it for some SF archive someplace.
Or put it on Ebay. Whaddyathink?
Filed under: on writing | Tagged: copy edits, corrections up the yingyang, manuscript mangling
