The cruise was great.\u00a0 We came home with wonderful memories butt sick as dogs, bringing with us a case of the walking crud\u2014coughing, sore throats, etc\u2014that was severe enough to send us both seeking help from our doctor.\u00a0 That\u2019s not something that happens very often.\u00a0 We\u2019re on the mend now but still not completely over it.<\/p>\n
While on our three week cruise, I completed and e-mailed the manuscript to the next Joanna book\u2014Field of Bones.\u00a0 Before the end of the cruise, the line editing came back, and I did that, too.\u00a0 Line editing means going through the manuscript word by word and making the changes suggested in the editor\u2019s edits along with some changes of my own.<\/p>\n
We arrived home a week ago today, late on Thursday night, not only jet-lagged but under the weather as well and spent a mostly brain-dead weekend. Monday evening the copy-editing arrived.\u00a0 Copy-editing is best described as encountering your strictest ever English teacher who has used a red pencil to mark up and grade your three page essay on, say, The Evils of Huck Finn.\u00a0 Oh, wait, that never happened to me.\u00a0 I\u2019m old school\u2014very\u2014and when I was in high school the world had not yet declared Huck Finn to be evil.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, you get the idea about copy-editors, except a four-hundred page manuscript is not a three-page essay.\u00a0 As my mother, Evie, would say, \u201cIt\u2019s a white horse of a different color.\u201d\u00a0 Copy-editing means hundreds or maybe even thousands of corrections that must be reviewed and marked as approved (or not).\u00a0 Since this is done on an electronic file, the dreaded red pencil marks no longer exist, but with several editors weighing in with their comments, there are any number of colors marking up every page.<\/p>\n
The copy-editing request came in late on Monday evening along with an e-mail pronouncement saying that it needed to be back in New York by today\u2014Thursday.\u00a0 I tried to work on it on Tuesday and made some slow progress\u201485 pages or so\u2014but I kept nodding off over the iPad, and copy-editing is something that requires razor-sharp attention.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday morning we had our long-scheduled appointments with our doctor for our annual physicals.\u00a0 He told us that we\u2019re gradually recovering from the crud, and that it isn\u2019t going to kill us.\u00a0 However, the appointments and accompanying blood work took up most of the morning, and Bill took me to lunch on the way home.\u00a0 We were back by around 12:30 PM, and that\u2019s when I went to work.\u00a0 For the rest of the day.\u00a0 And on into the night\u2014from 12:30 PM to 12:30 AM before I was finally able to press send.<\/p>\n
Some of you are probably thinking, \u201cSo what does she want, some kind of medal?\u201d Believe me, I am well aware that there are lots of people out there in the world who routinely put in twelve-hour shifts at jobs far more physically challenging than sitting in a chair and dealing with \u2026 well \u2026 GRAMMAR, of all things!<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the deal.\u00a0 I\u2019m incredibly grateful that, at age 74, I can still marshal the little gray cells and put them into action in a focused fashion in the face of a killer deadline.\u00a0 And if my mother\u2019s ability to work cross word puzzles well into her nineties is any indication, I should be able to keep on working for a very long time.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, my doctor asked me, \u201cDo mystery writers EVER retire?\u201d\u00a0 The indomitable Mary Higgins Clark immediately came to mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cNope,\u201d I told him.\u00a0 “I don\u2019t think we ever do.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The cruise was great.\u00a0 We came home with wonderful memories butt sick as dogs, bringing with us a case of the walking crud\u2014coughing, sore throats, etc\u2014that was severe enough to send us both seeking help from our doctor.\u00a0 That\u2019s not something that happens very often.\u00a0 We\u2019re on the mend now but still not completely over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[165,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-traveling","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-q7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1619"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1621,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1619\/revisions\/1621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}