Fun Editing Surprises
And I use the term ‘fun’ very lightly here. In a previous life when I worked on consumer magazines, press week was when I truly thrived. The build up was always the same, two weeks of procrastination, one week of hellish deadline meeting and knocking everything into shape then boom, back into press week mania where everything had to be proofed, edited and signed off. I loved it. With fiction, I feel the opposite. I loathe it. Maybe if I could guarantee it would all be over and done with in one week like the same stage of magazine production, I’d change my tune but alas, that’s part of the problem.
It’s usually a meandering journey of confusion, disbelief (what was I even trying to do here?), further confusion (Wait, why is this character doing this? It makes no sense!), frustration (Every time I come along a note that says something vague like ‘embellish’ or ‘fix this’. Great, past Kate, but HOW?) and self doubt. Plus a load of typos, grammatical errors, character inconsistencies and plotholes. Ah, such good fun.
Thus, heralds the urge to delete the entire thing or shelf it permanently which, to be fair, I’ve already done once with this particular story; the shelving not the deleting. Usually, after copious amounts of coffee, The Playlist booming permanently in my ears, lots of swearing and flicking through notebooks in desperation for The Answers, it kind of comes together so that I can send it to a proper editor. Not before I’ve made some fun discoveries, though.
This time round, one of my characters kept changing appearance. Another disappeared entirely for six chapters. One was supposed to be dead, but then suddenly appeared at the very end because my original plot line got blended in with the current version like the worst kind of nightmare smoothie. The best one though was on my final read, when I thought all my first edits were done, I realised that my FMC had been carrying a sword on her back the whole time, and yet she had wings, making the whole thing completely impossible. That was a great one. I wonder what else I’ll come across before it’s time for publication….pray for me, people, pray for me.