Friday, February 24, 2012

Off to First Publisher

Family Secrets was submitted to the first publisher on my list this past Wednesday. We will see what happens. I am not working on any additional submissions until next week because it is time for me to catch up on everyday life.

During the editing process -- oh, how I dread the editing process -- I worked 12-14 hour days. This was after I already had someone edit the manuscript. Unfortunately, I rewrote some sections and reworded a lot of sentences, so there were still many opportunities for editing.

Part of my issue is, I like sentences with dashes, such as the one above. That is pretty much a no-no. Yet, I like the cadence with the dashes better than using the separation with commas. Especially when I am writing in a first-person voice, I want to emphasize the choppy way some people talk. Dashes do it for me better than using the plain ol' comma we use to separate phrases in a complex sentence.

My editing teeth-grinders:

1. I was surprised how many times I left out the comma or question mark to finish a dialog sentence enclosed in quote marks. It was probably caused by earlier edits to that sentence. I just hope I caught them all.

2. I do my best to choose last names for my characters that do not end with the letter "s" because I always get confused with how to handle the plural and the possessive. Even as I read how to do it in the style manual, I get confused. Is it Jones's? Jones'? Then, when there two Joneses......

3. The proper usage of affect and effect always gets me, even when I have the dictionary open to the definitions as I write. I will figure it out, then when I read over the sentence later, I am still not sure I got it right.

4. The lie/lay and laid/layed/lain usage is always a quandary for me. I avoid those words like the plague when I can.

Other than that, I am pretty good at grammar. When I am editing, I still need to print out my manuscript in order to catch a lot of errors. But, for good, bad or whatever, the manuscript is on its way.

No comments:

Post a Comment