Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Back to work

Straight back in at the deep end after the holiday (nice break, shame about the weather *grin*) with four sets of edits that have all arrived at once. Most aren't too bad - just typos, punctuation and the odd comment but one seems more severe and I'm going to have to spend more time over that one.

The editing process is never the most enjoyable part of writing - watching someone else pulling your work apart is rather like having minor surgery without the anaesthetic - but usually it's an important part of getting a book or story just right. With the best will in the world, and no matter how many times I check them before I send them off, my manuscripts still have mistakes in them: spelling mistakes, typos, wrong punctuation, occasional glaring contradictions and howlers. Clearing those up makes for a cleaner and better piece of work and although it's tedious I don't mind doing it. But sometimes the editing becomes a disagreement over a point of style and that really is hard. There's nothing specifically wrong with what I've written - the grammar is fine, it makes sense, it even sounds good - and yet I have someone telling me it needs to be changed. I think of all the different facets of writing, I find that the harddest of all to deal with.

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