The hardest time to blog seems to be when there's actually a lot to say--during a conference, during grading, during periods of concentrated work on projects. At times like that, my mind is full of great ideas for blog posts, which then don't get written because doing a good blog post involves (or so it seems) more time than just writing a similar amount of text on something else. There are hyperlinks to include, tags to choose, and a surprising amount of proofreading. That said, failure to write blog posts is not due solely to being busy, any more than failing to enter books I've read into Goodreads. Sometimes I just don't get around to it.
Things have, however, been a bit intense of late, for both good and bad reasons. So I'll try to do a set of separate posts that can be rolled out gradually. I always like to get more than one post ready, anyway!
This one focuses on some good news, which we can all enjoy in this time of coronavirus pandemic. Yes, GOOD NEWS! Production on Magnetic Woman is picking up speed! Awhile back I sent in my edits on material for catalog copy, and last week I turned in my edits on the copyedited text. For authors, this is a very exciting time.
For those who aren't too familiar with the process of book publishing, the copyeditor's job involves things like making sure everything is spelled correctly and consistently (I am pretty good at spelling, but the copyeditor rightly pointed out that we can't have both Shklovsky and Shklovskij for the same person). And do all of the sentences make sense? Has the author said anything that might be unintentionally offensive (intentionally offensive is another matter, although still questionable)? Has the author capitalized words that the press doesn't? Has the author failed to include page numbers on citations? Etc. If this sounds like a proofreader's job, well, it's their job too, but the proofreader comes later, to catch whatever the copyeditor and author missed.
Copyediting comes in light, medium, and heavy forms, depending on both the needs of the press and how well the author writes. I would describe the copyedits on my book as light (I've been a copyeditor myself, and my sibling also went over the manuscript more than once before I turned it in), but there were still a fair number of queries for me to answer. Most, luckily, were easy. And as for Shklovsky vs Shklovskij, I said that the press was welcome to use whichever style of Russian transliteration they prefer, because this is an area where I have no expertise. The task that took me the longest involved the captions for the many figures. I had supplied standard identifications for my images, but the press also wanted me to write additional text. This took me longer than I expected, because in many cases I felt the chapter said all that the reader needed to know about a given image. In those cases I tried to come up with something that didn't sound too repetitive or lame, possibly unsuccessfully. More pleasantly, in some cases I was able to provide some added value by saying something about the caricaturist (I'm using quite a few caricatures of Czech cultural figures) or about the magazine in which the image had originally appeared.
The manuscript, with my fixes, now goes back to the copyeditor to finalize the changes.
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