{"id":3614,"date":"2010-08-19T03:00:29","date_gmt":"2010-08-19T10:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/?p=3614"},"modified":"2010-08-18T11:19:05","modified_gmt":"2010-08-18T18:19:05","slug":"justified-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/justified-or-not\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Just&#8221;ified&#8230;Or Not"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, I&#8217;m not blogging about a TV show. I&#8217;m celebrating finishing my edits for WHERE SHE BELONGS (Five Star Expressions, Dec. 2011). A few things I learned through the editing process:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>My characters smile and laugh and chuckle too much in this manuscript. I could not see this until my editor pointed it out. She axed a bunch of smiles, and I axed more after axing hers.<\/li>\n<li>I overuse ellipses&#8230;and why not? I love ellipses! But my Five Star\/Cengage editor isn&#8217;t the first editor to point out my overuse of the dot-dot-dot. Penny&#8217;s last editor for Red Sage Secrets caught me on it, too. To me, ellipses are a stylistic technique, but I can see how too many ellipses can&#8230;slow down the pacing (I had to think about that, thus the ellipses). I don&#8217;t think I STET&#8217;ed any ellipses that my editor took out (she replaced them with commas or dashes). My problem is, I need the editorial eye to point out which ellipses should stay and which should go. I&#8217;m too close to the characters and the story. Because I know I&#8217;m too close to the story, I didn&#8217;t &#8220;accept all changes&#8221; (using Track Changes in Word) and then read the manuscript to see what screamed &#8220;Clunk!&#8221; Instead, I went through each and every change, a learning experience.<\/li>\n<li>I overuse italics&#8230;and why not? I love my italics! I <em>love <\/em>my italics sooooooo much! <em>I love my freaking italics! <\/em>I do know I&#8217;m not alone in overusing italics. You see, Penny&#8217;s last Red Sage Secrets editor caught me on them, too, but assured me that I overuse italics less than other authors. So there. That my Five Star\/Cengage editor and my Secrets editor both caught me on my two biggest faux pas&#8230;I realized something. They both must be right! So, yes, alack, alas, amiss, I agreed with 95% of my Five Star\/Cengage editor&#8217;s corrections.<\/li>\n<li>I overuse &#8220;then.&#8221; This is the first editor who&#8217;s ever pointed that out to me, so maybe it&#8217;s a stylistic\/house thing. You know, those sentences, &#8220;I did this, and then I did that.&#8221; Or &#8220;I did this, this, then that happened.&#8221; My Five Star\/Cengage editor prefers another &#8220;and&#8221; to &#8220;then.&#8221; Or starting a new sentence. Okie-doke, I&#8217;m easy-peasy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Other than that, I rocked! No revisions, just the edits. I was pretty happy.<\/p>\n<p>After going through my editor&#8217;s edits, though, I couldn&#8217;t help but notice other things popping out at me that I&#8217;d never noticed before with this manuscript. So I went ahead and fixed them.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I overuse &#8220;just.&#8221; I&#8217;d love to justify my overuse of &#8220;just,&#8221; but I&#8217;m afraid I&#8230;I just <em>can&#8217;t<\/em>. I took out all the extraneous justs and just left the ones that just had to be there.<\/li>\n<li>I gave two extremely minor characters, one who isn&#8217;t even seen on the page, similar names\u2014Ellen and Elaine. I did not see this before re-reading the manuscript five times in one week. So Elaine is now Louisa.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Realizing that I&#8217;m too close to my manuscripts is a reason I&#8217;m hesitant to go the self-Kindle\/&#8221;indie&#8221; route at this point in time. If I ever did go that route, I&#8217;d want to hire a copy editor to go over my manuscript first. We think we&#8217;ve caught every error, we think our critique partners or beta readers might point out overuse-age, etc., but, frankly, critique partners and beta readers, IMO, should read more for story. A good editor who has never looked at the manuscript before, who hasn&#8217;t brainstormed story elements with you, is the person who will catch little ditties like my Five Star\/Cengage editor caught for me. Plus, that <em>she<\/em> liked the story feels great. I&#8217;d love to work with her again.<\/p>\n<p>What are your editing bugaboos?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, I&#8217;m not blogging about a TV show. I&#8217;m celebrating finishing my edits for WHERE SHE BELONGS (Five Star Expressions, Dec. 2011). A few things I learned through the editing process: My characters smile and laugh and chuckle too much in this manuscript. I could not see this until my editor pointed it out. She&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/justified-or-not\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Just&#8221;ified&#8230;Or Not<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-books","category-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3614"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3622,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3614\/revisions\/3622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}