Ok, I have received the ‘copy edits’ and have finished going over them.  Prior to this, I had this general feeling that the copy edit portion of the show would involve mostly things like spelling, punctuation, etc…it did involve those things, but there was much more to it than that.

I think the best way I can describe the role the copy editor plays is by describing one of the early edits mine made (I unfortunately don’t know the person’s name)…early on, I mention the height of an incidental character as being five feet six inches.  A little further on, one of the main characters mentions her height relative to his (her head head reached the middle of his chest)…the copy editor left a note indicated this would make the main character six feet six inches tall, and was that ok?

That was significantly taller than I had intended him to be…I made an adjustment to the manuscript to fix it.  I work in QA, and when someone finds a problematic but obscure bug they’ll say ‘good catch’…I thought the height thing was a pretty good catch.  There were other things…not an enormous number of them, and not huge things, but they were things like that…maybe they were things most people wouldn’t notice (hell, I didn’t, and I wrote it) but as I said in an earlier post, the devil is in the details.  There were numerous instances of word repetition that weren’t technically incorrect but which might interrupt the flow.  Reviewing these edits was interesting…once I got into the groove I noticed a couple things myself.  It’s all part of the learning curve - my self-imposed challenge is to give them less to find the next go around.

One other thing about the copy edit that for some reason I really got a kick out of was something they refer to as a ’style sheet’…I’m not sure exactly how it gets implemented on their end, but it included sections that listed locations, names, etc. and it scratched some internal creative itch of mine to see the street, building and borough names I’d created listed off, along with every character no matter how incidental, right down to nickname, and in one case maiden name.  Maybe it was because it made them seem somehow more real?

At any rate - it was an interesting (and I dare say fun) project to go through all the edits.  I believe there is one more wave after this, which will occur after the typsetting is done (I think).  More to come.

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