After publishing short stories for nearly a decade I am delighted that my first cozy novel, Well Read, Than Dead is being released this summer by Berkley Prime Crime. Turns out the editing process for novels is longer and involves more steps than the process for short stories. Let me say right here, I loved, absolutely loved, doing my copy edits. One great and unexpected joy is the style sheet that the copy editor put together, listing places, punctuation, names, descriptions—a help with the editing process and a gold mine for me as I write Death Branches Out, book two in the series.
Since I was fortunate enough to be able to combine my story edits with my copy edits, I found it to be a great pleasure to go through the manuscript line by line after I hadn’t looked at it for a very long time. Put in a comma, take out a comma—copy editor wins. When it came to dialogue I got to decide if I really wanted that character to speak in dialect, or this character to speak in jargon.
And, precise though I may be, the copy editor caught a major blunder. In the book I reference Subtropics, the magazine of the University of Florida. I had erroneously said the magazine was affiliated with Florida State University. Great catch by the copy editor. I really blew it, especially since I had read not one, but two copies of the magazine.
As a bonus I learned that although all seven of my grandkids call their winter pj’s “feetie pajamas” the correct name is “footie pajamas.” Live and learn.
Terrie
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