Copyedits, photos, tiny bugs
Hiya,
You know that time when you've just started seeing someone and you find yourself rereading messages they sent you a week ago? Going through five years' worth of their old photos? Maybe even listening to their podcast?
At the moment I'm like that about publishing. Here it is, this new thing in my life, and all I want to do is find out as much as I can about how it works and what can go wrong and what can go right. Step-by-step outlines of how a book goes from a draft to a thing in the shops. What the sales and marketing people might be up to at different stages of the process. Trends in cover design. What proportion of copies of a given book tend to sell in hardback. How did such-and-such book do, what about so-and-so? What do I need to know about writing a SECOND novel? What are the rules, how do I find out?
I'll read forty articles telling me the same thing in slightly different words, and then I'll still click on a link to another one. I Want To Know Everything, even the things I already know.
One thing all the articles say is: in the time between "a publisher buys your book" and "your book is in the shops", there are long periods where nothing happens, then periods of a week or two where Everything Happens At Once.
Turns out, that's true! And the last week or two have been Everything Happens At Once.
COPY EDITS
The main Everything that's been Happening has been: going through copy edits.
As I understand it, this is an editing stage that comes after "please fix this character and/or plot point" (round one, "developmental edits") and "please fix this sentence and/or paragraph" (round two, "line edits").
And the copyediting round is amazing. My copyeditor made one thousand six hundred changes to the manuscript but I don't have to do anything about most of them, other than nodding and going "yep, looks good to me". There's changes to the formatting, to line breaks, to sentence breaks when there's too many semi-colons all at once. A word repeated from eleven lines above and should it perhaps be a different word. Yes, great, all those things should be different! Consistency queries: wasn't your character wearing jeans two pages ago? She was! Fact checks: did you know that a narwhal has a tusk, not a horn? I didn't, but my copyeditor did. An absolute delight.
AUTHOR PHOTOS
The other book thing I've been up to recently is having my author photos taken. This is of course a task that comes with a big question: what sort of writer do you fancy yourself? Smiling, cheerful, interested, pensive? Colour photo (relatable) or black and white (serious)? What are you going to wear? How attractive do you consider yourself to be, and to what extent do you want your photo to reflect that accurately? (If the photo is too good, will this lead to years of people who look just a little disappointed to meet you?)
What do you want to be visible over your shoulder? Books, or out-of-focus mystery, or a nice garden? Trees in the snow? A cool decaying wall?
My editor recommended the photographer Diana Patient, who was just great - I haven't paid for the photos and received the final versions yet so I can't pop one in here but I'm SO happy with them.
We avoided the immediate "what sort of writer do I want to be" question by just taking hundreds: me in the garden, me by my bookshelves, me in a tunnel emerging mysteriously out of the darkness. Me in a big bright dress, in a serious black blouse, in a quietly pleasant dark green jumper. Leaning against a wall. Squatting down. Hunching in. Looking over a shoulder. No, the other shoulder. Leaning thoughtfully on a hand. With both hands on my face, yeah it feels weird but it'll look natural in the photos. Extending one foot to help prop up a big light reflector just out of frame.
I don't know if this is a normal part of the process but I like the idea that it is, that every author photo you see of Toni Morrison or Peter Carey or Monica Ali was taken after two hours of them switching jackets and contorting into weird shapes and spinning around in a chair and shaking their head to liven up their hair and trying to look curious, or surprised, or to stare into the camera with a furious intensity.
I'm not normally a fan of having my photo taken, honestly, but if you've got to do it and like me you lack the careful glamour of one born to the camera then I definitely recommend "a professional expert figures out how to make you feel comfortable and then spends three hours taking photos and then sends you only the good ones" as a process. One of the very best photos was taken as I stood in a tunnel and watched a nearby pigeon do a little shit so maybe we'll use that one for the book. Maybe that is the sort of writer I fancy myself.
GARDEN REPORT
What else? Well, we have leaf miners in the garden, who live... inside the leaves of trees? And dig little winding tunnels just below the surface of those leaves, creating trails that you can see from outside? What a weird videogame-enemy thing for a real insect to do. Turns out the solution to leaf miners is "get some lacewing larvae, which will eat them" so I guess it's time to order yet another box of insects to come in the post. I draw the line at buying nematodes to eat slugs, though, I'm vague on what a nematode is but I feel like it's probably gross.
READING REPORT
The best thing I read this week was Caroline O'Donoghue's The Rachel Incident, which was great, a told-in-retrospect story of the narrator's early-twenties life in 2010-ish Cork - it's funny and chaotic and full of bad decisions, and characters that feel quickly like people you kind-of know, friends or friends-of-friends or even the people you hope won't turn up at the party but you know they probably will. Written with a really disarming clear-eyed kindness about everyone in it and their messy choices. Lots of specific Irish-person-living-in-London details that I recognise from Terry too, which was nice.
Okay that's it, speak soon,
Holly