Daughter of Mystery: the next revision process

[hrj]

I dropped by BayCon for the day yesterday to have some hanging-out time with scotica and take receipt of her feedback on Daughter of Mystery. One of the most concrete useful pieces of feedback I got, given that one of her functions was as a "target readership Subject Matter Expert", was that she ended up being late to work in order to finish reading it. Ah, the things that warm a writer's heart!

I think I'm now ready to begin the second serious revision pass. (Still have two test-readers to check in, but I'm confident I won't need any massive changes based on their input.) So in addition to all the specific notes and comments I've received, I've set up a new chapter-spreadsheet with the specific editing/revision topics I know I need to work on. If more topics come to me as I progress, I can add them to the spreadsheet and know which parts I've already covered and which ones I need to go back and do. Over-organization FTW. Checklist items so far:

Content: More casual reference to ordinary everyday religious practice, not just the mystery-related aspects. Since I'm using actual saints (slightly disguised) in the mystery ceremonies, make more concrete references to their stories/attributes that indicate why I'm using them. More regular background reminders of the developing romance.

Structure: Verify/adjust the consistency of viewpoint focus (I sometimes slip in the tightness of the third person). Review for regular distribution of visual/sensory description; watch out for talking-heads scenes. Review clarity of interpersonal reference, especially when using it to reflect viewpoint attitude.

Mechanics: Verify consistency of spelling of proper names. (Some of them changed during the writing process.) Adjust proper use of commas, hyphens, semi-colons, and m-dashes. Correct spacing around these and between sentences. (When composing on the iPad, the short-cut for a period is a double-space, but what this gets auto-converted to is a period and a single space.) Correct or at least standardize capitalization of key elements, especially noble titles. Check for consistency around smart-quotes/apostrophes. (Hmm, must check what the industry standard is these days for submissions. I know the rules for electronic submissions have shifted requirements more towards the WYSIWYG side, and I suppose there are some details I should only worry about when I get to the point of sending it out to specific markets.)

I'm sure I'll think of a few other things.

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Evidently I'm totally behind the times. Nobody uses double spaces at the end of a sentence any more. (Except for my employer's technical writing style guide. Which means nothing because, not having an actual technical writing group, we're lucky if the people preparing and editing our documents can write in complete sentences with plausible spelling.) How have I managed to miss this revolution? In any event, it turns the issue into a simple search-and-replace task.

This is from Lauri (I don't write in it, but it allows me access to other people's journals)

[abd07.livejournal.com]

I learned to type in secretarial school in the 60s, and I am absolutely unable to stop putting a double space after a period. I have read many Internet screeds about what a terrible thing this is, but I can't stop!! (And so far at least, no one who reads my stuff seems to care.)
There's a wonderful blog called "The Subversive Copy Editor," from someone who works for the Chicago Manual of Style, and this entry has a lot of interesting comments on the post-period double space (mostly, they're against it):
http://www.subversivecopyeditor.com/blog/2010/07/advice-for-writers-preparing-your-emanuscript.html

[xrian.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the need to double space after a period was an artifact of the limitations of typewriter fonts. Fonts that are not "monospaced" (all letters the same width) don't need it. Two spaces after a period is now a "zombie rule", I.e. long dead but some people insist it has to be correct because That's What They Learned In School.

(No intent to cast aspersions on people who do it out of long habit or people who simply don't consider it important. It's not. But I'm an editor, so I fix it. It's the people who INSIST it's the only correct way who annoy me.)

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I don't know if a period is still supposed to be followed by two spaces. I haven't followed that convention in decades (since I started using a computer).

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Good luck with the next revision pass!

I think I stopped using two spaces after a full stop some time in the late 90s/early 00s. I still feel that smart quotes are a bit iffy because it depends on what software is used as to whether they show properly or not, but they may be increasingly compatible.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

On smart quotes, I think my approach will be to do a global replacement for "dumb" quotes in order to standardize everything. I figure that a submission with all-dumb is more likely to be universally acceptable than all-smart. Back in the '90s when I was working at MZBFM we converted everything to single-spaced sentences, but I seem to recall that submissions were supposed to come in with double-spaced ones. (You might remember that better than me, since you were submitting! I was just converting.)

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I can't actually remember the precise submission details, but back then I was probably still double-spacing after a full stop anyway. Thankfully it's something that's very easy to sort out using Find/Replace.

Similarly, though the UK has switched to single quotes like this ' for speech, I still use double quotes ("). This is partly out of habit, but also because if I want to submit to the US, it needs to be double and whilst you can easily change from " to ' using Find/Replace, it doesn't work the other way around (or at least not without looking at every single one) because you end up with words like don"t and I"m.