I thought I sent Tricia Callahan a clean manuscript of Under Shōko’s Bed to copyedit. I had stuck as closely as I could to The Chicago Manual of Style and had looked up all the spellings I was unsure of on the Merriam-Webster website. I was ready to give Tricia an easy payday. But it turned out I had not learned the meaning of thorough. Words I thought I knew turned out to be spelled wrong (e.g., police canvass a neighborhood, not canvas), I had too many echoed words, my punctuation was wanting (e.g., I thought I had fixed all the dialogue sections so that only dialogue tags connected to dialogue with a comma, but there were multiple places I had missed), among other problems.
By far the thing I had the most trouble with was punctuating italics. It is very difficult to know when the punctuation should match the italics of the sentence or phrase versus the roman of the surrounding text. I was able to glean some general principles from Tricia’s edit, though, and can use those to guide me in my other novels. Under Shōko’s Bed, though, is unique in my novels in its use of italics. There are imagined dialogues that use italics to help the reader know they are not actual dialogue. I doubt that I will ever have as much trouble with editing and italics again.
In all her thoroughness, Tricia was the consummate professional. She even created a “Style Sheet” for me to reference as I went through the changes. This included a list of characters, places, abbreviations, words she looked up, and a complete timeline of the scenes. Luckily, I had been very careful with the timeline as I wrote and there were no problems. I had even gone so far as to make sure that art exhibits, etc. in the characters’ pasts were real events. And in my behalf, I should say that most of the problems in the manuscript were small things that the average reader would never have noticed, but which would have driven me crazy when I finally found them. It’s nice to know there’s someone who can point them out to me so I can fix them.
Still, even with all of the problems Tricia found, it was not uncommon to go for pages between errors. In the end, I was able to input all the changes into Scrivener in a single day. So it was a very worthwhile edit. It’s a better manuscript now. Every writer deserves to be humbled. We need to be reminded that perfect text is almost always out of reach. The deeper humbling, though, will likely come when I self-publish the novel. I do not have readership locked in.