I received an email from a friend wanting to know the real title of Title B (see Tuesday’s blog post via the above link if you haven’t already read it) (and, no, I’m not telling the real title) and she noted that, although she follows me on Facebook and Twitter, she had no idea I was going through editing hell.

That was a deliberate decision on my part.

We all give glimpses into our writing processes. Peeks into our work days. It’s not only what we do, but it’s who we are. So you might see me say, “these edits are killing me” or “back to work on the book from hell”, which may be true…or may be hyperbole. But what if I had “live-tweeted”, so to speak, my way through the seemingly endless and grueling weeks of edits for Title B…

My editor says Title B sucks so bad she won’t read the rest.

My editor says Title B still sucks. Kill me now.

My editor says Title B doesn’t suck anymore. Now it’s just boring.

Nice, huh?

Even if I tweeted all through the “fixing” stages, that’s a pretty crappy subliminal “first impression” message to be feeding your readers. When they see the news of Title B’s release, you don’t want their first thoughts to be, “Oh, yeah. That’s the one her editor said sucked hard”.

I don’t believe every book-related tweet has to be typed in a rainbow font and signed with widdle kitty kisses, but you should always try to be aware of the image of your book you yourself are building.

Angela James and I have five years and twelve titles of varying lengths and subgenres together. By grabbing a random sampling of three from those twelve titles, I can give you a brief peek into what my edits are like and the only variable is the book. Same author. Same editor.

Title A:

There were numerous editorial comments. Numerous. There weren’t really any heavy revisions involved, though. Awkward sentences. Timeline issues. Fleshing out some things leading into the resolution that were rushed in my desire to get to The End. Taking care of a few inconsistencies in motivation. Page after page of making the book stronger.

It was days of work, but nothing particularly “hard” or stressful. Just my editor and I happily working together to make my book the best it could be.

Title B:

My first round edits on this title consisted of “This sucks so bad I’m not even going to bother reading any farther”. And I’m paraphrasing a little, but not much.

It was devastating. I had no coping skills for this. And I couldn’t shrug it off and shove it under the bed. This book was a done deal and I had to make it right. I rewrote the opening chapters and sent them off to her.

“Still sucks.”

More panic. Rewrote the opening chapters and sent it off again.

“Meh.”

Ohmigod levels of panic. Took a few breaths. Let go of the way I’d perceived the book. Rewrote the opening chapters. Again. Sent them in. Again.

“Now you’ve got it.”

That should have triggered a huge sigh of relief, except I had a whole book that no longer went with the opening chapters. So it was time to gut it and essentially start over. And the clock was ticking.

It was grueling. It wrecked me mentally. It wrecked me emotionally. It really wrecked me physically. My family suffered. My extended family essentially got locked out of my life. The dog and the cats learned to walk on tip-toes. I’d never had this happen to me and I had no coping skills for the process taking this hard, ugly turn on me. I wanted to quit a hundred times every day.

But I didn’t quit. Because along with every email telling me the book wasn’t what we wanted it to be, my editor was there with suggestions on how to fix it. Offers to call me so we could talk through it. And every email closed out with the same sentiment: I know you can do this. Her belief in me was the only thing that got me through day after day after day of my belief in myself being swept out from under me.

And we did it. Together my editor and I got through the hard and the grueling and the panic and the occasional temper flare and came out on the other side with a book we can both be proud of.

Title C:

The timeline for this title, from my receiving edits to addressing the comments to sending it back to my editor to her accepting the edits and forwarding it for copy edits was less than three hours. It was that clean and, with the exception of some typos and grammar things and an awkwardly constructed sentence, I nailed it the first time.

It’s rare…but it happens.

What are edits like?

The moral of the story? I can’t tell you what your edits will be like. Nobody can tell you what your edits will be like. It doesn’t matter if your friend is with the same publisher—or even has the same editor—and tells you edits will be a breeze. It doesn’t matter if your edits have been minor in the past. Look at mine. The majority of my edits fall in the Title A category, but all of a sudden…BAM! Title B comes along.

Your edits will be whatever they need to be for your book.

Edits are about you and your editor making that book the best it can be. Those edits might be light or they might suck the creative soul from your body and leave you slumped—nothing but an empty shell—over your keyboard. And you do them, because that’s your job. It’s your job to make sure the reader who’s giving you her hard-earned money gets the best read you can give her and your editor is your partner.

Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s hard. But, in the end, you hope you have a book you can both be proud of.

AND, she invited me to submit a post for her new “Behind the Lines” feature, which is very cool. If you pop over there, you can read about how a moment with my teenage son and a moment with Joe Kowalski’s teen nephew got all rolled up in an emotional ball for me. I’m not analytical by nature, either as a reader or an author, so the piece was challenging and fun for me to write. Go check it out!

Therein lies madness. For you. For your editor. Especially if the book takes place over a short period of time. And in the book I’m working on now, though it has a much longer timeline, it’s just as important because there’s a pregnancy involved. I’d like to avoid my editor saying, “You know, dumbass, she’s pregnant for thirteen months here”.

I think my timeline issues are exacerbated by the fact I write scenes madly out of order. When you jump around like a grasshopper on crack, it’s kind of hard to keep track of the continuity.

So my plan for today is to print up blank calendar pages and fill in what I’ve got written so far. Then the ongoing plan is to fill stuff in as I go along to avoid combing through the complete manuscript looking for time transitions, which isn’t fun at all.

We’ll see how it goes.

I’m currently doing edits for my June Carina Press release, Exclusively Yours. (I hope to have a blurb soon so I can make a page for it.) So, while I’ve talked about it before, what better time to talk about the editing process than while you’re in the editing process?

The one thing I figured out early on is that, no matter how insecure you consciously feel, every writer has a strong creative ego inside. (And I’m probably going to refer to that creative ego has as if she were a separate person in this blog entry. This isn’t because I’m wacky and believe I’m channeling some divalicious Muse, but because it’s easier.)

Published authors have to be two people—the creative person and the business person—but edits are a weird bridge between the two. If creativity was Heaven and business Hell, edits would be Purgatory. You’re still crafting the book, which lives over in the creative land, but now your editor’s trying to shape it into a viable commercial product and there’s some business in that.

In the beginning, I really struggled with the creative ego versus the professional writer. Now, I let my creative ego have her day. When I get the document back, I open it and read through all the editorial comments and let her have her hissy fit of indignation and self-righteousness. I call this my “out loud” round of edits because the responses are all said out loud, rather than typed into the document. (Because forgetting to delete them would totally suck.) What might those “out loud” comments be?

Here’s a hypothetical example:

Editorial comment: This could be an action tag.

Creative ego: Could be a one-armed spider monkey, too, but it ain’t.

That sort of thing. She can get pretty bitchy when it comes to her words, but eventually she runs out of steam. I usually try to wait until the next day to open the document again and then, because the creative ego had her tantrum, I can look at the manuscript a little more objectively. Remind myself my editor wants the book to be the best it can be and isn’t just randomly screwing with me. The creative ego still rears her head now and then, though, so I think in the second round I usually have about a…60% percent “willingness to change” rate.

Then I do it a third time, sometimes just a few hours later, focusing on the edits I rejected. By this time the editing process has reminded the business side that we’re not far from asking readers to pay hard-earned money for this book and the creative ego’s been satisfied enough so she’ll hush.

By the time the third round’s done, every editorial comment has been seriously considered and weighed to within an inch of its life, and anything left unchanged is something I’ll willing to fight for. Sometimes, if my editor comes back with her reasoning, I’ll cave in the next round. (And the times I haven’t caved, I’ve gotten smacked for those things in reviews, so I cave more often than not, now. )

So that’s my editing process. And it repeats again with final line edits. Some things I change, some things I stet, and then later I’ll go through it again and change a lot of the things I originally marked stet.

The creative ego that seems to utterly fail me during writing always roars to life during edits and I’ve learned to let her rant and rave until she runs out of steam. So much easier than trying to muzzle her.

How much do I detest having to fire up the old Toshiba laptop? I actually considered buying a Kindle copy of my own book so it would automagically appear on my iPod. Go ahead, you can say it. That’s pathetic. (Side note: my husband says I actually sneer when I have to use the PC desktop for his business now. I’m quite sure he’s exaggerating.)

Instead, I decided it was time to set up Calibre on the Mac and get that all straightened out. Then I found the zip file of digital author copies in my email archive, downloaded them, converted through Calibre and sent the book to my iPod Touch.

Where I was horrified to find all of the italics missing. So horrified, in fact, that my initial impulse was to immediately buy every device and program needed to check every format of my book. The italics are present in the PDF version, but what about the others?

Is it a side effect of running it through Calibre and onto my device? Are the countless people using Calibre to convert to ePub and sending it to their devices not seeing the italics?

Excuse the melodrama, but that overwhelms me with a need to put my head between my knees and take deep breaths so I don’t pass out.

There are so many things in the writing industry authors have no control over. But the one thing I absolutely control is my craft. I choose the words I put on the page. I choose how they’re presented. If a word or a sentence or entire passage is italicized, it’s because I chose to present those words that way. Deliberately. For a reason.

Perhaps the italics is for emphasis in dialogue. Or it signifies a text message or a note or a memory. A bit of internal dialogue to be set apart, even from a deep POV. Sometimes it’s used when the POV character’s remembering a bit from a previous conversation.

His taillights faded into the distance and she knew he wasn’t coming back. Her honesty had come too late. Why couldn’t you trust me with the truth?

His taillights faded into the distance and she knew he wasn’t coming back. Her honesty had come too late. Why couldn’t you trust me with the truth?

The reader’s going to get it. She read the previous conversation during which the words were said. But the italics are like a visual clue to the reader’s subconscious and without them, she’s going to stumble, even if it’s only for a few seconds. She’s not going to stop and reread a passage very many times before she’s annoyed with your book.

There’s always talk about digital publishing’s effects on an author’s career. I just never really considered its effect on an author’s craft. I’m dismayed to think about how many readers aren’t reading my words as I intended for them to be read.

It also stars Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, Alfred Molina, John Hawkes and John C. McGinley. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t recognize Rebecca De Mornay. And here’s the blurb:

Stranded at a desolate Nevada motel during a nasty rainstorm, ten strangers become acquainted with each other when they realize that they’re being killed off one by one.

Probably as late as two-thirds of the way through, the husband asked me what I thought of it and I shrugged. “Meh. Pretty standard cheesy horror-lite. But it’s not like there’s anything better on.”

Then some stuff happened. We both perked up a little and when the movie was over, we said simultaneously, “That was a pretty good movie”.

The twist was not only awesome (though, I feel, a little scientifically wonky), but the writers played fair. The clues were there to be found, from as early as the opening credits.

But I couldn’t help but wonder—how many people turned the movie off halfway through? Not only was it standard killer picking off guests at isolated motel fare, but it wasn’t even that good. If John Cusack hadn’t been in it, I would have shut it off. Or if the husband had insisted on finishing it out, I probably would have read.

If it was a book, it probably would have been relegated to the DNF column. And that would have been sad because the last third of the movie was interesting and unique and compelling.

So that’s the writing lesson I took away from the movie:

It doesn’t matter how incredibly awesome your show-down scene is or how mind-blowing your ending plot twist. If the lead-in chapters aren’t also compelling and interesting, the reader may never get there.

Very often, sitting around the restaurant, the Tall Kid and I will commence plotting. It’s always a Devlin Group book because he couldn’t care less about my other books. And we use the yeah, but method of plot brainstorming.

What if he…

Yeah, but I did that in the first book.

Well, what if she…

Yeah, but…

What if…

Yeah, but…

And so it goes.

Needless to say, we’re working on DG4 and we yeah, but-ed ourselves a plot and it’s a doozy. A nice, big bad-ass plot with plenty of opportunity for some cool shit.

Yeah, but…

It won’t work and TK just can’t accept the why not of it. I explained to him that, if that plot was happening, Jack would go to ground with the heroine—lockdown in a safe location—while the other guys went after the bad guy. Not so compelling now, is it?

He’s fighting for it. He first argued there was nothing wrong with that because the other guys going after the bad guy would be more exciting. I had to explain—yet again—that in romances, the readers like to actually read the hero and heroine’s story.

Then he tried the “just do it anyway” path, but I just can’t. The reality is that faced with an enemy there’s a good chance they can’t stop, the hero would not go running around with the heroine. They’d put her in a secure location and that would be that until the threat was neutralized.

So now TK’s at it again, trying to find a way to salvage his favorite aspects of our plot while dodging that giant yeah, but… I threw at him.

That means today is your last day to get it for $1.00. (If you live in the US, I guess.)

That’s right—$1.00.

What is Way of the Cheetah? It’s more than a writing how-to book. It’s like an intense session with Lynn Viehl during which she shares the philosophies and methods that have made her not only one of the most prolific writers I know, but a NYT bestseller. (At the time she wrote WotC, she was already a USA Today bestseller.)

If you’re a writer who gets caught up in the online social world of romance—worrying about your social media status and somebody else’s successes and whether you’re sitting alone in the Romanceland cafeteria—this book will be especially helpful to you. Way of the Cheetah is about so much more than writing efficiently, though that is the core message.

As with any book on writing, not everything in it will work for everybody, but I guarantee any professional writer will find something in Way of the Cheetah that resonates. Isn’t that worth $1.00?

Hell, yeah.

If you haven’t read Way of the Cheetah by Lynn Viehl, you should. I can’t imagine a better way for a professional writer to kick off 2010.

GET IT HERE!

One of the things driving me batshit crazy I’ve been noticing of late is a change in the structure of dialogue passages. To me, there are three ways to build a paragraph with dialogue.

“I hate when you say something’s against the rules.” Maya slipped off an orange Nike and chucked it at Shannon’s head. “There are no rules.”

Maya slipped off an orange Nike and chucked it at Shannon’s head. “I hate when you say something’s against the rules. There are no rules.”

“I hate when you say something’s against the rules. There are no rules.” Maya slipped off an orange Nike and chucked it at Shannon’s head.

Dialogue/narrative/dialogue. Narrative/dialogue. Dialogue/narrative.

Lately, though, I’ve been seeing a lot of this…

Maya slipped off an orange Nike. “I hate when you say something’s against the rules.” She chucked the shoe at Shannon’s head. “There are no rules.”

“I hate when you say something’s against the rules.” Maya slipped off an orange Nike. “There are no rules.” She chucked the shoe at Shannon’s head.

I’ll admit—because I don’t think Maya could actually throw her shoe from Texas to New Hampshire, no matter how much I annoy her—that I think dialogue construction has rules, and that I’m not the best at dealing with change. As a writer, I can say up front my dialogue-building isn’t going to change. I’ve managed to train myself to put one space after a period instead of two, but my adaptability has limits.

As a reader, is this something I’m going to have to grow accustomed to? Is it a new style that’s here to stay, or is it rule-breaking that’s being ignored?

What do you think?