The reality of a CEM

[mer]

Copy-edited manuscript. Waiting in my door. Kinda stuck in there, clinging halfway up. Like Spider-Man.

It's so... real.

Awesomely, though? dancingwriter was my freelance proofer on this. Which I figured out sometime in the last ten minutes. I KNOW dancingwriter. Many of you know her. I AM MUCH LESS SCARED NOW. Not because I think she's gone easy on me or anything--just a quick glance through the work of my publisher's in-house copyeditor plus dancingwriter, AND my editor's Nth pass on top of those... Eep. It's a wonder I don't crumble up in a ball of grammar-doubt and vocabulary-fraught.

It's more real than cover art, in a way. I mean, cover art is all well and good, and that'll go on the book, and be the icon of the book, the symbol of it, but that's just it--it's the icon of it, the symbol of it. (I can't share my cover art yet, but it's beautiful, so, so, so beautiful, and I grow to love it more each day.) Whereas the copy edits make the book a thousand times more real in my mind. I (frequently) buy books based on their covers, yes, but I judge them for their copy editing.

Comments

[kendare-blake.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on the copy edits. And I followed the links to A Guide to Commuting to the Underworld...and loved it. Very clever and rich.