copy edits & stuff

I spent the larger part of yesterday doing copy edits for URBAN SHAMAN. They were surprisingly painless. There are about five things I will do in the future which will reduce my poor editor’s efforts by about 80% (further->farther, leapt->leaped (although I don’t particularly like ‘leaped’, it’s certainly not a hill to die on), towards->toward, grey->gray (ditto ‘leaped’, but with more prejudice), and replace all my –s with emdashes), but by and large, I think there are maybe five sentences in the whole thing that I was like, “Um, no, leave it the way it was,” or where I’ve said, ‘ok, I see your point, let me rewrite that my way’.

I still think people can hiss things without there being any esses involved. And I also think it’s very odd that she didn’t know what “looking through my eyebrows” was, because everybody I asked just did it right away and knew just what I meant. :) And apparently I’m not as clever with my whom-and-whoevers as I thought I was. *sulk*

Also, there are wonderful notes in the margins. Hearts next to the first description of the bad guy (which is, if I do say so myself, beautiful), and next to the first description of Morrison. *stupid beaming* There’s a place she went, “AUGH!” in the margin (causing me to cackle gleefully, because *I* go AUGH every time I get to that bit, and hell, I WROTE it!), and another bit where she wrote, “I KNEW it!” which made me laugh with smugness. There’s a note at almost the end where it says, “This is going to be hard to top!” (true, but I set up this entire series in a very specific way in my head; I *know* it’ll be hard to top, but I wrote it that way on purpose), and at the end she wrote, “A really exciting, fun and promising story, Catie. I can’t wait to see what happens next.” *beam*

I’m sure not all my copy editing experiences are going to be this gentle, but for a first time, boy, this didn’t suck at all!

Now to email and ask about the notes in the margins I couldn’t read. :)

In other news, winter has arrived. It’s cold and there’s snow and the wind is nasty and I don’t waaaaaaaant to have to walk in it. Waaaah! We went to see “Ray” yesterday (it was very, very good, although it got a leetle long) and when we went in it was bright and semi-sunny, and when we came out there was an inch of snow on the ground. Eee!