For all of you people who have expressed your concern about my case of sniffles from a week ago, they\u2019ve turned out to be just that\u2014allergies. But when I wrote that Tucson Festival of Books blog entry a week ago on Monday, the world was a different place than it is today.<\/p>\n
Remember that old song?<\/p>\n
Home, home on the range
\nWhere the deer and the antelope play.
\nWhere seldom is heard a discouraging word
\nAnd the skies are not cloudy all day.<\/p>\n
Well, the skies are pretty cloudy right now. And discouraging words are pretty much everywhere. (Remember this sentence later on in the blog when you get to the part about echoes!)<\/p>\n
So what we\u2019re doing here is what we\u2019re supposed to be doing\u2014sheltering in place, reading books, listening to music, and turning off the TV news whenever possible!<\/p>\n
I work from home, so this isn\u2019t really that new to us. I\u2019ve spent the last five days doing two mind-bending jobs of editing. I spent three days doing line editing on Missing and Endangered (Joanna), followed by another three days doing a second galley pass on Credible Threat (Ali.) Unfortunately, in the course of that, I discovered a problem. (For incidental readers, the differences between line editing and galley editing are outlined in a previous blog entry, but I can\u2019t for the life of me remember which one!)<\/p>\n
I have a new copy-editor\u2014a wonderful copy-editor, by the way\u2014who does a terrific job of catching my echoes\u2014which is to say repeating myself and using the same word over and over. So I\u2019ve become aware of my echo propensity in terms of individual manuscripts. So I\u2019m trying to correct that where corrections are possible. (See what I mean? And see \u201cpretty\u201d above. Blog entries don\u2019t go through official copy-editors!)<\/p>\n
This time, however, the echo problem was one that moved from book to book. Yes, I have a name file for each series. But when I\u2019m working on Ali, I don\u2019t go looking at the Joanna or Beau name files. It turns out, I should. Because I was working on both books in such close proximity, the problem jumped out at ME! Since line-editing is earlier in the process and since two of the repeated names were spread throughout Missing and Endangered, I was able to fix that problem with a global search and replace. The third one showed up toward the end of Credible Threat. Making changes at galley stage is more cumbersome and had to be done by hand. I think I caught them all and fixed them, but only time will tell.<\/p>\n
So now I\u2019m officially off work. I\u2019ll be writing another Ali book next but at the moment I\u2019m feeling depleted and so I need to regroup. I need to read other people\u2019s books where I\u2019ll be able to ignore other people\u2019s echo problems. For five days I worked almost round the clock. I did NOT get my steps. That changes as of today. Since my home is my gym, closed gyms are not a problem. I\u2019ll be walking my usual 250 step lap. We did our usual three-time-a-week, sit-and-grow-fit workout by FaceTime. Our grandson\u2019s exercise program has taken a hit because he can\u2019t bowl with bowling alleys closed, and Celeste, the granddaughter who coaches gymnastics, is also sidelined. As is the granddaughter working in restaurant management in Dallas.<\/p>\n
When I came out of my editing isolation into the publicly mandated one, I discovered that my long delayed manicure is on hold for the foreseeable future. There\u2019s no way to do a \u201csocially distanced\u201d manicure!<\/p>\n
This is a challenging time for everyone. We happen to be members of the \u201ctargeted Coronavirus demographic.\u201d We\u2019re at home worrying about our kids, grandkids, and great grandkids who may not be officially targeted, but who, of necessity, are out more than we are. We\u2019re not just worrying about them, we\u2019re praying, too.<\/p>\n
And I for one, think President Trump\u2019s declaration didn\u2019t go far enough. It should have been a GLOBAL day of prayer, not just a national one.<\/p>\n