You can probably imagine my trepidation at opening the MS Word document, waiting as it loaded and filled my screen.
Yikes... track changes... lots of them. As well as a lot of yellow highlights. And then there were the editor's comments. Gulp!
First things first, I read it all through from start to finish - the track changes and comments, not the manuscript - to see where I had 'gone wrong' and to try and figure out just how much I had to do.
Which was when I got a rather pleasant surprise - being called 'a delight' by my editor should have given me a clue but hey, it's my first time and I wasn't sure what to expect. Upon closer inspection, I realised it was all minor things, like curly apostrophes instead of straight ones (which I really need to find the checkbox for). Aside from a few 'awkward' or 'run on' sentences, my biggest problem was repetition; you don't want to know how many sentences started with either 'he' or 'she', or how many times I used 'but'.
The content itself? No problems it would seem... WOW... can you imagine my happy dance yet?
So, the first thing I did was accept the track changes for all the niggly, silly things. Great... job done. No issues there. Then it was back to the beginning to work through the modifications required... not quite as straightforward, trying to find different ways to open a sentence without using he or she all the time. I did it though, fixing my awkward or run on (overly complex, long-winded) sentences as I went through.
A last read through and it was all done so I sent it back to my editor, but then my round two edits appeared in my inbox too. There were only a few track changes though, taking no time at all and I sent them back straight away. Sometimes there can be third or fourth round edits but apparently my writing is 'very tight' and I'm done.
Now it's been passed over for 'line edits', whatever they are, and that should be the final tweak for my book. After that, I'll need to nail down the blurb and my author bio etc, and hopefully get a release date. All I need now is my cover art and I happen to know it is with the cover artist and should be done this month.
It's coming together very nicely indeed, even if I do say so myself.
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