I turned in the copy edits for Three Shots to the Wind yesterday. (Look for a celebratory giveaway at the end of the post.) It’s always exciting and a bit nerve racking because I’m hoping I caught everything. I did find a big mistake that I’d thought I’d fixed before I sent the copy edits in. It had to do with the timing of the plot. Chloe goes to see someone and becomes one of the last people to see that person. Yet Deputy Biffle doesn’t show up to question her for thirty-three hours! Oof! That can’t happen.
I realized I either had to move scenes around which didn’t seem like it was going to work very well (I was afraid I was going to have one of those days that seemed endless) or come up with a really excellent reason why it takes Deputy Biffle so long to question Chloe about the missing person. So there I was tap, tap, tapping my hand on my desk while I went back and forth about what to do. Then I played a couple of games of spider solitaire which didn’t provide me with any insights.
Although, not long after that I realized I had come up with a solution. I opened a new document, cut and pasted a scene, and then rewrote most of it. Then I used the read aloud function and listened to the scene. It worked, probably even better than what I thought I did originally. Whew.
Here are some examples of what my copy editor does for those of you that haven’t ever seen copy edits before. I’m the Microsoft Office User– the copy editor is rlg.
Oops! I forgot to check the lists of characters from the last two books and reused the name Blake. Blake became Garth.
Above I was doing a little sentence smoothing and fixed something that didn’t work well with another scene.
Here is a sneak peek at the first couple of sentences in Three Shots to the Wind:
Today I went back to writing the fourth Chloe Jackson book. It’s still a mess, but I’m kind of in love with the story. I just hope it stays that way, but I’m sure I’m going to hit the despair “this is the worst thing I’ve ever written and everyone is going to hate it” phase of writing soon. It happens every single time.
Readers: To celebrate sending in Three Shots to the Wind, I’ll give away a copy of either From Beer to Eternity or A Time to Swill to someone who leaves a comment. Do you get to a “I hate this project” phase when you are creating things? Or just say hi!