We’re good at unseeing ourselves. We don’t sound to the outside world like we sound in our own heads, for example. I recently asked my wife, a singer, why this was, and the way she put it was: the human head is an excellent resonator. To ourselves, we sound like we’re speaking in a cathedral. Everyone else just hears our voice in the room. This isn’t just true of voices, of course. We don’t look in the mirror like we look in pictures, or to other people. And while our words might not read better to us than they do to others, they sure read differently.

Which brings us to the reason you’re getting a shorter post this week than usual. I’m still working on my manuscript, or trying to—but I also just received the copy edits for the book due out next year, about which more details as I can share them.

Now, many people read a book as it wanders through the publication process: beta readers, agents, editors, proofers, prospective blurbers and supporters and so on. But the copyeditor is the person whose job is to zero in on precisely where the writer’s use of language gets… odd.

This is a complex and often thankless job. Writers tend to think they can write. Many of us (including me, at times! though, I hope, in private) get our backs up when we see a redline suggesting that we kind of can’t.

Except… that’s not really what the copyedit is meant to convey. You don’t sound the same outside your head as you do inside it, that’s all. To what extent does your personal storytelling syntax depart from conventional English usage to an extent that would confuse a prospective reader? And of course: none of us is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. Have I broken this general principle of syntax for effect, or because I forgot? Or my fingers slipped when typing? Or I made some kind of cascading tense adjustment and missed this one verb? Or did autocorrect assert its ducking self once again?

My favorite part of this process is the style guide: a document created by your editor and copy editor throughout the copy edit process, indicating how your writing, in general, gets weird. It’s a display of care and attention to the text. Style guides also tend to feature wonderful alphabetical lists of people and places and terms mentioned in the text. When you’re writing a book involving our world—with perhaps a few fantastical elements—you get this awesome collage effect, your whole manuscript laid out and cut up and reassembled out of order. Each distinctive term suggests the context in which it was used—the style guide becomes a kind of memory palace key to the whole manuscript.

Some of these terms are load-bearing; some are dumb jokes. Some are absolute inconsistencies. (Lawnmower? Lawn mower? If I stare at those two side by side for long enough I get into one of those “have you ever, like, really thought about your hands, man?” kind of fugues.) And they’re all there, without hierarchical preference. It’s neat. And scary. The book proceeds along its quest.

So, that’s the situation. Manuscript under way. Copyedits commencing. We’re all fine here. How are you?

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Just read: To the Chapel Perilous, Naomi Mitchison. Phenomenal.

Listening: Dungeon synth. Did you know about this genre? I didn’t, until recently! Synth music with D&D/80s fantasy anime vibes. Rhandir was my introduction and I’ve been listening to Taur-nu-Fuin a lot.