Sunday, July 8, 2012

God Bless Copy Editors

The copy editor (God bless his/her soul) has been poring over India #3 with a sharp red pencil, er, cursor, and I thought you might find it interesting to see what the copyedited version of a manuscript looks like.  Here's a view of my computer screen.  The quality isn't great but if you click on it and strain your eyes, you can see the sort of comments a copy editor makes.

4 comments:

  1. Is the first an anachronistic correction for using Old Blighty and the second a grammatical correction? Hard to tell what the second comment says. Something about eliminating "word" in the phrase "mention or word." And that's a combination of guessing and squinting to deciphering.

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  2. It's a terrible picture, isn't it? The answer to the question is yes, it is an order (phrased as a suggestion) not to use "Old Blighty" as the phrase was first used during WWI. As for the second comment, the editor is noting that he has made a change to avoid the use of "word" twice in one sentence. Actually, I'd used "word" once and "words" once in the sentence, but the editor's change avoids the repetition.

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  3. Interesting! Looking up that website to check my own anachronisms on writing.
    Can't wait to read the next India book (is it a short story or a full novel, by the way?).
    Anyway, keep up the good work Ms. Carr

    PS: Great blog too. Loved the uniforms bit :D

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  4. Hi Paula,

    Book #3 will be published in February, but I'm also doing a short story, "India Black and the Rajah's Ruby," which will be e-published in December of this year. If you are one of those physical books only types, I think you can download a PDF version from the publisher's website, but I'll publish the details when I have them.

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