{"id":3449,"date":"2026-05-29T06:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T13:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=3449"},"modified":"2026-05-27T19:42:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T02:42:10","slug":"editing-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2026\/05\/29\/editing-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Editing Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

News has been pretty thin on the ground this week. I\u2019ve been busy doing what I call the Galley Proofs on the next Ali Reynolds book, Smoke and Mirrors<\/em>. \u2018Galley Proofs\u2019 is a term that sticks in my head from my senior year of high school when Pat McAdams Hall, my best friend from fourth grade, and I, were co-editors of the school newspaper, the Copper Chronicle<\/em>. The paper was published once a month. Once the articles were written, edited, and sent to the printer, it was our job to organize the pages and send them back to the printer at Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch Gazette, (Yes, there was an actual brewery on that street back in the older old days. Clearly, at this point the 1960s are the \u201cold\u2019 days.<\/p>\n

Then on the night before the actual printing, Pat and I had to go to the printshop and peruse a paper copy checking to see if there were any remaining goofs. Somehow, in our November issue, we failed to notice or fix a place in our joint column where we referred the Thanksgiving turkey as being \u2018born\u2019 rather than \u2018hatched.\u2019<\/p>\n

These days New York publishers use some other term, one which definitely doesn\u2019t stick in my head, but it means the same thing\u2014editing the copy-edited manuscript after it has been formatted and typeset in the way it will appear in the actual book.<\/p>\n

This is not a time to do a complete rewrite. It\u2019s one last chance to check and fix typos and echoes. I\u2019m sure everyone knows what typos are. Echoes are repeating the same word or phrase in close proximity. I happen to be someone who does a lot of those. After all, if it sounded right the first time, why not use it again? In my last copyediting go down, not with this publisher, the copyeditor was so busy readjusting my characters\u2019 names that I caught way more echoes than she did.<\/p>\n

But with that bad taste still in my mouth from a month or so ago, I was dreading this one, especially since, for some reason, Smoke and Mirrors<\/em> was a really challenging book to write and took far longer than expected. So I was surprised when the book moved smoothly along, shifting seamlessly from one character and location to another.<\/p>\n

In order to facilitate that, each chapter is time stamped at the beginning with the location, date, and time of day displayed in bold print directly under the chapter designation. But here\u2019s the rub. I\u2019d be reading along in the text itself when, wherever the term A.M. appeared, it was a bold print, A.M., thus making it look like A.M. was most important word on the page, which it wasn\u2019t. Then, later in the book, when the term P.M. appeared, it wasn\u2019t in bold at all.<\/p>\n

Prior to that, I had circled and complained about all those offensive, bold-faced A.M.\u2019s, because I felt they were disruptive, but I hadn\u2019t done anything about them. But then, when I saw that one plain-Jane P.M., I hit the wall. I couldn\u2019t do a global search and replace because there were a lot of bold A.M.s in the chapter headings. Instead I had to do a search-and-destroy scroll through the entire manuscript. Fortunately I had circled all of them in red, so they weren\u2019t that difficult to find.<\/p>\n

All that being said, I\u2019m sure a couple of sneaky typos are still lurking in there, and I expect my faithful SERs\u2014Sharp-Eyed Readers\u2014will weigh in on those.<\/p>\n

Late last night, I sent the Galley Proofed manuscript for Smoke and Mirrors<\/em> back to New York, ten days before the deadline. Now it\u2019s time to go back to Unnamed Joanna #22. There\u2019s a timing tangle at the beginning of the book, and I think I\u2019ve finally figured out how to fix it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

News has been pretty thin on the ground this week. I\u2019ve been busy doing what I call the Galley Proofs on the next Ali Reynolds book, Smoke and Mirrors. \u2018Galley Proofs\u2019 is a term that sticks in my head from my senior year of high school when Pat McAdams Hall, my best friend from fourth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":"Editing Again","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}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-TD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3449","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=3449"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3450,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3449\/revisions\/3450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}