Editing Gives me Morning Sickness

It really is true that getting a book published is like having a child. The writing is the fun part, the editing is the pregnancy, and the marketing and publicizing must be the birth. Then comes the parties, balloons, and sleepless night wondering if the kid is going to grow up and make enough money to take care of you how you deserve! So, we are just a few weeks away from being done with the pregnancy part of our process and ready to go into labor to get the thing taken care of. There is a reason we haven't blogged for the past few months - it is because no one likes to have pictures of themselves pregnant. We had morning sickness for quite a while, cried, got depressed, wondered why whe had gone to all the work to get this far, and in the end reached resignation to the fact that we would have to just stay calm and carry on. And yes, probably not the best metaphor for pregnancy, but you get the picture.

But, now that we are nearly through with this phase, I think it is worth a look back on how the whole thing went. It was a unique experience on a lot of levels. First off, Mike, Jaren and I had NO idea what we were doing. Literally. About a month ago our editor, Karen, sent us an email with how you are supposed to edit a book and included how we had screwed up almost every step of the way. Yeah, hilarious. Except for Karen! So, we went into the thing really quite blind. And I would say - Mike, this isn't how we are supposed to be doing this, and Jaren would say, Jed, why are you doing this, and Mike would say, we have to have this done yesterday, and all of us would just get so confused because we all THOUGHT we knew what we were doing, but really, I think three salamanders in a jar could have figured it out quicker then us.

We hadn't really prepared ourselves or the book for editing, which was a problem, I think. We thought - the editor will fix all of it :). Well, the editor, bless her heart, tried to fix as much as she could, but she assumed that the book was how we wanted it to be. We realized, a bit late in the game to be true, that the book wasn't how we wanted it to be. At all. And Elizabeth (our editor) and Karen (our publisher), found lots of flaws that we sort of kind of actually really knew were there. An example was that we had a baby in a few scenes. None of us liked it, but we didn't know what to do with the dumb thing. It really got in the way of everything (and if my kids are reading this - that is most definitely NOT a metaphor for real children - mostly). It took some work, but we managed to get rid of the baby, and there was much rejoicing. But it wasn't simply finding a comma, changing a then to a than and vice versa (which happened a lot due to a strange tick I have with that word), or cutting out some fluff. We had to redo a ton of stuff. We basically spent three days doing nothing but rewriting the entire pay-off chapter. Yeah, it was a mess, but so much better.

But, we got it done, were very happy, and waited for round two. This really was more editing, but I got carried away. It wasn't that I wanted to change things, there were just tweeks that needed to be done. And we had rushed through the first round so quickly that there were things that hadn't been fixed. So, we went through round two and did the best we could. We didn't change story lines, plots, characters, etc., but we did a lot of changes. I think at that point Karen really was doubting her decision to take us on. But, we got it to her, it was finished. Mostly.

So, now we are on the last round of edits, and we are just fixing up little copy-editing things, and should be done by the end of the month. Then comes the heavy breathing, the pushing, and with any luck, a happy, healthy, baby that will make us all rich.

My goal, therefore, is to write at least once a week, hopefully on Fridays, to update everyone on how the book is going, what we are up to, and any bits of information I can share. I will probably put up a few passages from time to time that are pretty cool. But what I really want to do is to continue to tell the story of Mike, Jaren and I how we came to write the book and how we are writing the book. So, I will probably from time to time look back on some part of the process and include information on how we did certain things, or how we came to certain conclusions, or how we survived the process. It should be fun, and I'm looking forward to it.

Okay, that is it for today. This was a very short (trust me on this) outline of the past four months. They seemed to drag on forever but now that they are gone it seems like it was just a blink of the eyes. We are so proud of the book that will come out hopefully this May, and we hope you like it. From us to you, have a great one!