Since the subject line here says “tracking bubbles,” some of you, especially parents, are probably thinking about those little things used to dip into a bottle of “bubble juice” before blowing air through it, to watch masses of transparent bubbles float skyward. If that’s what you’re thinking, nice try but no cigar. The tracking bubbles referenced here are of another sort entirely.

If this blog is a “window on my life,” then the past week has been devoted to the chore of copy-editing. In the “old” days, the UPS guy would drop a heavy envelope on the front porch, and inside would be a paper copy of the manuscript for my next book with almost every page flagged with a Post-It note. I would do the work with a sharpened pencil and send it back, a one or two day job at most.

Copy-editing is actually the third stage of editing. The first is before the manuscript goes to New York and is done primarily by my husband and my agent. The second is the “editorial letter stage.” The editor sends the manuscript back to me with his or her suggestions for changes. This is actually the “big change” stage of editing.

I can remember my first editorial letter for Beaumont # 1 almost verbatim:

Until Proven Guilty takes place at the end of April and through the early part of May. All days are consecutive; no days are skipped. Unfortunately between Tuesday May 2 and Wednesday May 3 there is an extra unnamed day. Please fix.

I did. It took a lot of work. I had to take everything that happened on that extra day and duct tape those scenes into other places in the book. One, a scene I loved, never made it into the published book at all because it happened at night, and the book had run out of nights.

That’s editing stage two. Which brings us to stage three. Think of copy-editing as coming from your most demanding English teacher ever. For me that would be Mrs. Anne Medigovich from Bisbee High School. Written papers turned in to her came back with a grade at the top and penciled red marks all over them along with incisive and occasionally snide comments designed to put upstart students in their proper place. (By the way, getting an A in Medi’s senior English class usually meant that when you went on to college you’d wind up in the Honors English course. I did both–got the A and went to Honors English, and I’m still grateful.)

Speaking of Bisbee High, there’s another part of my high school experience that plays a part in this blog because, it turns out, everything is connected. I learned typing under Mr. Biba’s and Miss Franklin’s tutelage some fifty-odd years ago. Back in those “dark ages” we were taught to put two spaces behind the punctuation at the end of each sentence. Bear that in mind. Times have changed, but my fingers have not. If you don’t believe me, check the sentences in this blog. You’ll find two spaces behind EVERY period. And that, my dear reader, brings us to this week.

On Thursday a week ago, my editor’s new assistant called from New York to let me know that although my editor was on vacation, the copy-edited manuscript for Moving Target was ready to go. Did I want to have it sent in paper or did I want to do the copy-editing electronically? I was at a point where I could go to work on it right then. I had never done electronic copy-editing before, but how bad could it be? “Send me the file,” I said, and she did.

The file came with two sets of directions, one for PC users and one for Macs. I read every word. The first instruction said this: You MUST have Tracking Bubbles on.” Which is exactly what I did. When I opened the file, there appeared on the lefthand side of the manuscript a solid purple column of “tracking bubbles.” Each bubble contained a written account of what the copy-editor had done, and from each bubble a small purple line led to the affected location in the the text. My changes showed up in blue boxes with blue lines, and that’s where my typing history caught up with me.

It turns out times have changed. Putting two spaces at the end of each sentence is no longer in fashion. Now it’s only one, and the copy editor had helpfully removed a single space from the end of every sentence which, with the tracking bubbles, made every page of the manuscript look like a complicated purple cobweb. The many bubbles and lines made the file as big as one containing architectural drawings. The sheer mass of the tracking display meant that there were more bubbles on each page than could possibly show on each page which meant that I couldn’t see lots of them anyway. The resulting mishmash drove me nuts and the first time I tried to save the file after making a couple of changes, things started going downhill.

If you’re a PC user, you’re familiar with that pesky egg-timer that shows up on your screen and stays there saying: YOU HAVE DONE SOMETHING TO MAKE ME MAD, AND YOUR COMPUTER IS CURRENTLY OFF LIMITS! In the end, either your file will return and you’ll be able to continue, or your computer will quit (something referred to in the tech world as a ‘Crash,’) If your computer crashes, you will have to restart your computer having lost whatever work you’ve just done. (PC users no doubt already know this!)

There is no egg-timer in the Mac world. There’s a little rainbow colored circle that spins around. After years of working on Macs, I had hardly ever seen that brightly colored circle. Until this week! It came on every time I saved the copy-edited file. Every time I hit save, the computer locked up for a minute to a minute and a half. Mac types out there reading this are probably shaking their heads because they already know the solution. I didn’t, and I was far too stubborn to ask for help.

I struggled on, and it turned copy-editing into a slow, tedious process. A job that, done in colored pencil and paper, used to take one or two days took five: Thursday; Friday; Saturday; Sunday; Monday! Then, late Monday evening, things got even worse.

I had managed to work my way through the book until I was one hundred pages from the end, when my brand new MacBook Air started crashing. Occasionally I could do a little work and save it, but as the evening wore on my computer stopped saving and started crashing over and over, SIXTEEN TIMES. (I did mention I’m stubborn.) I went to bed at one o’clock in the morning, despairing, because I knew that five days’ worth of work were gone. I couldn’t save the file; I couldn’t print it; I couldn’t export it.

On Tuesday morning I was on the phone with New York in panic, meltdown mode. It was the day before my copy-editing deadline, and I couldn’t send them anything. At all. I was still on the phone with production, yelling in frustration and trying to sort out a solution, when my husband and hero, the retired electronics guy, quietly stepped into the fray. He asked to look at the computer. He studied the screen. He turned the Bubble Track Switch from on to off and voila! The purple column disappeared from the left hand side of the page. The purple lines disappeared from the typed manuscript. All that was left were some tiny triangles that said the copy-editor had done something. I could no longer tell what, but who cares? Once the tracking trail was gone, Bill was able to save my file. And my life. And my deadline.

I finished copyediting the last 100 pages of Moving Target without seeing a single hint of that rainbow hangup bauble. Now I’m on my way back to Joanna 16.

I believe I’m much older now than I was a week ago. I’m sure there are a few more gray hairs. And next time? When they tell me I MUST have the Tracking Bubbles on? I’ll tell them:

Hell no! Those tracking bubbles have to go!

In the meantime, I’ll do my best to remember only one space at the end of each sentence, but it’s hard to teach an old typist new tricks.