‘To Read and Read Again!’

Repetition. *sigh* And I’m not just talking about removing crutch words from your prose or just picking out sentences that use a similar, repetitive structure. I‘m mean going over a manuscript again and again and again to find the sentences that cluck clunk, to correct spelling and ensure you’re saying you’ve said exactly what you meant to say.

I’m talking about thinking that you’ve done with it all you’re finished when in truth you’ve only just begun.

I’m not going to strike through the whole of this post with my corrections – there’s no need for you to see those – but do you get where I’m coming from?

I sent Breathless Press the most complete manuscript I could. It had been through four beta readers, had rigorous edits before and after and I was sick of it. When Jenn got in contact about the editing process we would follow, she said we’d see perhaps four passes of content edits on the manuscript. Then it would go to line edits.

-_- Read that line again.

Four passes of the manuscript before going to line edits, meaning possibly another one or two read-throughs after that.

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I wasn’t ready for that. Not by a long way.

I knew there would be some work to do – there always is – but that many? But I’ll tell you what: each time I went through that manuscript with notes and things to look for, I found things to change. Sentences to tweak. An opportunity to take a dive into deep POV. Spell errors. Grammatical fuck ups.

Even now I know that I could look at that document again and want to change things. I’m scared to look at it for fear I find something else that needs to be tweaked or swapped or deleted. My brain is so raw from reading that text that there are sections I can recite from the top of my head.

But did the manuscript benefit from it?  You damn well bet it did. ^_^