J.A. Pitts

Black Blade Blues – Page Proofs complete.

The journey of BLACK BLADE BLUES from my brain to print has achieved another milestone.

I finished the Page Proof stage today. This was an enlightening stage. One of the things I learned that when you do copy edits, you should always make yourself a copy of them before you send the mark-ups back to your publisher. Luckily I did that. However, something I hadn’t considered. I did my copy edits with a green pencil. Showed up really well on the copy edited pages, but when I photocopied them, more than half the time, the green did not render completely. Oops. That was difficult in places.

For the proof stage, the first thing I did was read the novel through cold, like a reader would. I found about a dozen items to correct, many of them were things that were missed in the copy edit stage. Almost all were dropped words, or capitalizations for consistency.

Then I went through the copy edits, page for page and checked the proof pages to make sure the CE changes were included into the manuscript. Here I found a bunch more errors.

Funny thing is, some were simple misses, but a couple were because in my copy edit notes, I was obviously not clear on what the change should be.

This gives me a HUGE advantage for novel 2. Once I get to the Copy Edit stage of HONEYED WORDS, I’ll use a darker pencil or pen, make sure I can read the marks on the photocopy before sending the original to NY, and finally insure the changes are clear and precise.

I’m thrilled with how all this has gone. I have an outstanding editing team. I just hope you folks like what you read when it comes out on April 27th, 2010.

Peace.

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