Who says the life of an independent author without a competent, affordable editor in the wings has to be boring? Why, I just got to spend the last two hours poring over my serialized novel deciding whether hyphens should be in descriptors like nail-biting, or between color adjectives like red & white, or not be in phrases like half helmet.
Does it get any better than that?
Sarcasm aside, it’s no wonder I’m oh-so ready to launch my latest novel onto a serialized platform I’ve never used (Kindle Vella). However, as was the case with my previous novel Pearl Fields and the Oregon Meltdown that I published as an ebook on Kindle in 2022, I refuse to green-light this companion novel till all the burrs & bumps have been smoothed out to my satisfaction.
Now, my notion of being ready might not square with a professional editor’s, but my dedication to detail does grant me a bit of comfort knowing that if I stay true to my system & keep accurate records, I’ll eventually reach the moment when I can release it to that corner of the publishing world knowing I’ve left everything on the field, as the saying goes.
Of course, I’ll still have plenty of opportunities to laugh at both my own shenanigans getting to that point, as well as the trove of comments & cartoons posted by other indie authors depicting a writer in the throes of revising till the bitter end as an unseen editor tries to wrest the coveted manuscript from their clutching, ink-stained hands.
Till next time.
Drew
P.S. If you’re ever in need of a solid reference for copyediting, I continue to recommend Dreyer’s English. In this case, his section on dashes (pp. 62–64) came in handy since I was able to verify that I did indeed want an en dash, not an em dash, to separate the numbers in the above page reference.
