Friday, December 12, 2008
The manuscript is back!
Okay, so the manuscript has been back about a month already now. But hey, better late than never, eh?
On November 5th, which in England was Bonfire Night but in America was just another Wednesday, I sent my manuscript to Ann Fisher, a Literary Editor in Marietta. Ann called the week before to say she was ready for it, and I rushed to finish the last chapter. I had a bit of a nightmare with Microsoft Word as it somehow removed all my italics throughout. This meant I'd have to go through the entire thing again and italicize those words and sentences that require emphasis. WHY I was using Word I don't know — it's not the first time I've had issues with formatting! I must remember to use something simpler next time, like WordPad or even a simple text editor. Word is good for final preparation — setting up page headers, auto page numbers, and so on. But in my experience I can only safely preserve formatting by using a simpler program.
Anyway, I finally finished Island of Fog. (Fanfare please.) It runs to about 95,000 words and 23 chapters — exactly what I expected. It took ages to print and my wife, Vanessa, called downstairs at one point and said, "What are you printing — a novel?" She thought she was being funny, but I had the last laugh. It printed to 295 pages at the required double-spacing, inch-wide margins, and so on. I packaged it up, wrote a check, and sent it via UPS to Ann on that momentous Wednesday afternoon, November 5th.
The manuscript returned two weeks later on November 20th. Prior to sending it back, Ann phoned me twice to let me know how she was getting on. The first call was when she got to Chapter 11, and at that point she seemed very happy with it overall. This was a huge relief, but I was still nervous about the second half. I hadn't put quite so much time into polishing the second half, particularly the last five or six chapters, and I also wondered whether the overall plot would come to a satisfactory end for an objective reader.
The second phone call came just before Ann sent the manuscript back. I was grinning as she told me she had enjoyed it immensely, and that she hadn't found an awful lot to edit. She said she'd done a "light edit" only, offering suggestions here and there as well as correcting typos and colloquialisms (I have a problem separating British from American these days!). All in all, she said the manuscript needed very little editing. There were no big scenes to cut, nothing major to revise; in fact she advised to leave it alone — just run through the light edits and send it out to agents.
The manuscript arrived back home with a very nice letter that started:
The good news is that I have no bad news, which is very untypical when it comes to evaluating a client's novel. In the case of Island, it is, first of all, in much better shape than you may have thought and, as we discussed on the phone, your "concerns" were minor. Very possibly because you are (as with most writers) too close to your book and not quite able to be objective enough, and even finding fault where there is none.
The letter is three pages long and very detailed, and the manuscript is littered with little red marks that suggest changing this to that, and so on. All of this I find extremely helpful, regardless of whether the comments or suggestions are positive or negative. Still, I was frankly amazed that most of the comments were positive. Since this is the first time I've had the novel appraised as a whole, and by an experienced literary editor no less, I was perhaps thinking expecting a wake-up call, to find that I'm a very long way from publishable! I do still have a long way to go yet, trying to find an agent, but at this point I at least feel able to move on to the next step — finding an agent.
Between now and Christmas I expect to run through the manuscript one last time and correct numerous small things. After that, probably as the New Year begins, I'll begin the process of finding and writing to agents.
This post has 11 comments
Congratulations on finishing your novel! :-).
Julian Parry
Will it be available to buy here in the UK?
Best wishes -- Julie
To Julian and Ralph, it's always funny to see mixed opinions about Microsoft tools. My own opinion is that Word is generally okay but only if you switch off all the idiotic functions (the help thing, and the auto formatting, and changing quotes to smart quotes, etc). The grammar tool is worthless. But Word is ahead of the rest on speed and because of its powerful search and replace tool, which allows me to search for and place HTML tags around words that are styled in a certain way (ie, italics). Not many word processors can do that. It's also useful because it has a good macro function, so I can save all my usual search and replaces as one simple recording -- so I can convert formatted text into HTML at the press of a button (stripping extra white spaces, changing smart quotes and dashes to plain text, adding paragraph tags, and so on).
And before anyone tells me you can simply "save as HTML"... Don't! The result is the biggest mess in history. I've yet to find a "convert to HTML" function that produces what I call clean code! My hand-built macro is far better! :-)
Ralph, I've used AbiWord and the larger OpenOffice suite, and various others, and they're all fine. AbiWord in particular is a perfectly decent word processor (and free!). And yes, I've used my HTML editor for writing as well, but there comes a time when it needs to be "paginated" and styled correctly (one inch margins, double line spacing, etc) and while I can do the styling in HTML, I can't paginate it and other things.
I'll try AbiWord again though. It's been years since I looked at that. But if the search and replace tool can't find styles and place tags around them (eg, change any italic words into <i>any italic words</i>) then Word will remain my primary tool. No point having various different ones for different things.
As for the Word issue, I think there's two. An editor you like that you're familiar with and can do the things you desire, like search and replace. And turning you work into the desired format.
On the editor front, I'd have thought most text editors could do your search and replace, including not turning "many italic words" into italics. But if you're familiar with Word and its macros, that's fine.
But the key point of writing plain text with mark-up, and I'd have thought HTML-style mark-up is particularly noisy and interruptive to the flow, is that it can then be run through a program to produce the desired format. That might be HTML with one file per chapter, a properly laid out PDF suitable for publishing, including crop marks, etc., or a double-line spaced, big margin version ready for red ink.
Especially given that most novels require little unusual formatting compared with technical books, I'd have thought your own little mark-up language which you then turn into, e.g. troff input, and then have GNU groff turn that into PostScript, PDF, HTML, etc. would be suitable. If you don't like its HTML output, then it wouldn't be onerous to write your own little mymarkup-to-HTML convertor.
And by the way i just love Enid blyton!! my name is sushmitha but you can call me sushi!
thanks a lot
http://www.lulu.com/
Regards...Martin
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