The RSI of editing ...

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 04/12/13

I've been putting off attacking the edits from Jayne at Rebel. Avoiding looking at the email, avoiding looking at the manuscript with all those notes on it. Yes, I did have painting to do (walls and ceilings, nothing artistic) but I still should have looked at them sooner. I'm only talking a couple of days here, but as someone who pounces on chores like this as soon as is humanly possible, this was a big delay for me. I didn't realise how addictive they'd be. I decided to have a quick look at them this morning - next thing you know it's 5pm, I'm starving and my RSI is giving me hell. I had to put my foot down at 100 pages or risk not being able to work tomorrow because of sore wrists. I've been pleasantly surprised that all the changes so far are stupid little things that I should have seen myself, plus some weird shit going on with the formatting. Every time an indent has decided to disappear, that's another click of the mouse. Those clicks add up. I'm sure there's some nasty edit waiting for me somewhere though. Something that will stop me in my tracks; one of those things that leads to changes all over the show. Then it'll be a case of going back to the painting for a few hours while I nut out how to deal with said edit. The painting has been very therapeutic and a good way to free up my brain, allowing me to concentrate on things like the storyline for book number two. I've already got 50,000 words in a rough first draft on this one and I basically know where it's going. I also know that a few of the common changes in the first book will also need to be incorporated into the second. Better to know up front. A lot of the changes in the current manuscript are to do with style rather than typos/grammar as such. For example I was taught that anything that is going to be in italics should be underlined to denote this rather than actually put in italics. I think this is a throw-back to the good old typesetting days and has now been ditched with e-book formatting in mind. Sort of mistake you only get told about once though. For now, I’m off to rummage in the freezer for peas to slap on my wrists.