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]

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.