The editorial process - with pictures!

Somewhere near the end of September, the first round of editorial notes for The Shore popped up in my inbox. Since I was in the middle of making a wedding happen at the time, I wailed in desperation once, plowed through them as thoroughly as possible, and winged the result back to my editor. I'm not sure if it's the same across the board, but in this case the notes consisted of a list of comments regarding specific pages and lines, and a shorter list of comments on the general structure and content. For the most part they were about things that had been bothering me already; the biggest change was cutting out one chapter and dividing the longest chapter into two, a massive change which massively improves things but that I wouldn't have had the resolution to do on my own.

Fast forward a month or so (thankfully to the other side of the wedding) and a two-inch thick printed version of the manuscript arrived by post, having been thoroughly gone over by a copyeditor:

The fuzzyness isn't so much to prevent spoilers as me needing to get a better camera.

Besides the little squiggles having to do with typographical corrections and consistent punctuation, the copyeditor also sent a batch of notes. Most of them were exceedingly useful - like everyone I have a bad tendency to repeat words within paragraphs and pages, and a lot of the dates have been shuffled without being properly double-checked against each other. Other ones... My favorites so far are 'It would be a bit hard to get an entire breast in his mouth, surely?' and 'do roads in the States have a double yellow line up the middle?' 

The notes from the American editor came across while I was halfway through the copyeditor's, so both were dealt with at the same time over a manic four days, because the typesetter needed the finished draft as soon as humanly possible. 

Fast forward to yesterday, and this showed up:

Flat proofs, also two inches thick. These are the same two pages as above, but laid out the way it will look when it's published. I'm a bit in love with the typeface.

This time, instead of working from a list of notes and emailing back my corrections with page and line references, I get to mark up the actual paper with anything (reasonable) I think needs to be changed and mail it back, and a little bit after that a paper-bound copy of the proofs should come winging back.

Fortunately for me, this batch of revisions is a little less urgent: yesterday morning I tried to pick a shirt up off the floor, my lower back went 'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,' and now I owe a lifelong debt of gratitude to the doctor at the Reading walk-in clinic for dealing with it compassionately, the NHS for making it free, and my spouse-thing David for all but carrying me there. In the plus column, now I know what diazepam and prescription-strength muscle relaxants feel like, which is something like novocaine only in my brain. In the minus column I am not Hunter S. Thompson, so between the drugs and the fact that there is no position in which it does not feel like the Red Pyramid is ripping out the last foot or so of my spine, I don't foresee anything getting done in the next little while that won't have to be chucked out and done again when I can think clearly.

When I have finished marking up the flat proofs, and the bound proofs come wandering back, they should look a bit like this:

MY BABY HAS A FACE!

I've been keeping the cover to myself since I got it, but now that it's possible to pre-order on Amazon I figure I'm allowed to show it around a little. The above is the UK cover, courtesy of the incomparable Suzanne Dean; the US cover is quite a bit different, though the innards are the same: 

MY BABY HAS TWO FACES!!

This is apparently because the two markets are very different in regards to what kind of covers sell. I'm more than a bit relieved that neither of them involve a tube of lipstick, a stiletto heel, a cosmopolitan glass, or a photograph of half of a woman's face with the gaze directed away from the viewer.

 The US pre-order is here, and the UK pre-order is here; I found out that they existed when my cousin posted them on Facebook about a month ago. I'm still trying to figure out how to keep any relatives or similar individuals whose good opinion I want to retain from seeing them, but that might be a lost cause.  

And now if you will excuse me, there is a sofa with a hot water bottle calling my name.