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Editing Liad, a discursion

Back, oh. . .twenty years or so ago, I was employed as a copy editor on night-side news at the local newspaper. My job was to fact-check articles submitted by the reporters; put those articles into house style; rearrange them, if necessary; and write a headline. House style at that point was the Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual.

Newspaper work is the Very Basic Level of copy editing. The text has to be punctuated and capitalized consistently according to the manual, the spelling has to be right, the sentences have to be straightforward, the quoted facts have to be correct, the headline has to be unambiguous, and all of this is subservient to having the paper up and off the floor at midnight.

Because newspapers are copy edited story-by-story, this is a precise, but relatively simple operation -- especially when compared to copy editing something as complex as a novel; and trebly so, when the novel in question is part of an on-going series.

Ideally, an on-going series will have one copy editor who has worked with it from Book the First, and begun compiling her bible then. (If the case of the Liaden Universe®, the copy editor's bible would now be into many volumes.) Most of us? Don't get that lucky.

In the case of the Liaden books. . .

I remember our editor at Del Rey calling us up to yell at us for having turned in such a bad manuscript, that had required so much work from the copy editor, and adjuring us to Do Better with our next book. Since she already had the next book on her desk, that wasn't going to happen, but I did go through our copy of the manuscript and the mass market of Agent of Change when it arrived, and tried to derive house style.

I did the same thing when Conflict of Honors came out, only to find that? Some of the changes that had been made "to style," so I thought, in Agent either didn't get changed, or were "fixed" in another way for Conflict. I mentioned this to our editor, whose response was, "That's not how it's supposed to work."

Yeah, guess not.

We did one more book with Del Rey. I confess that I didn't check house style on it, and our editor didn't mention anything about how much work the manuscript had required when listing our other failings, so maybe we'd finally gotten the hang of it.

The next book we saw published was Plan B, with Meisha Merlin, which was, I'm pretty sure, copy edited. We never saw an edit letter, or a copy edited script, or any queries, but there had clearly been somebody riding herd on the sentences. Later books with Meisha Merlin certainly were not copy edited, and in the case of I Dare, even the authors' corrections were ignored.

Embiid, though, did copy edit the manuscripts; it was done by one person who was familiar with the series -- who was in fact a fan of the series -- (and who, in passing, remarked on how clean the manuscripts were in general (sigh)), so in terms of having been edited, the ebooks through Crystal Dragon have had the most consistent hand, though they (like Meisha Merlin) accepted the three Del Rey books as-was, because they had already been copy edited.

All of which is in service of explaining: (1)why there is no Liaden Universe® bible, and (2) why reading the previous books (even if she had time, which really, she doesn't) isn't going to help a copy editor brand-new to the series derive Rules.

Making matters worse is the fact that we are idiosyncratic writers. It matters to me how things look on a page, as those who have heard my How I Name Characters riff will recall. I do try to limit my use of Random Capitals in manuscript, and to clean up those that inevitably sneak through, once the Heat of Creation has passed off. Writers, though, are notoriously bad at cleaning up their own stuff. Which is why, thank ghod, we have copy editors.

A copy editor's first care is consistency. Therefore, a request for a Rule might be: Is it house or House?

The answer -- it's both -- isn't immediately useful, though in the Liaden Universe® it happens to be true: "house" a structure in which people live; "House" the clan entire; the people who make up the family.

"Is it dragon or Dragon?" yields a similar "it depends" answer, and the copy editor might soon come to suspect that the authors are toying with her.

The copy editor's other care is clarity. The text must be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. There is, therefore, a wish to have every person and place properly named when they first come on-screen, and every funny thing -- like "cantra" -- explained immediately.

Clarity is a good thing. However, there can be too much of a good thing, so the tension between the copy editor and the authors is: How much clarity is too much? and, How smart do you think your readers are?

Apparently, we expect a lot from our readers. We expect that they, like we, can figure things out from context. We expect that they, like we, have read in a variety of genres, and from a variety of authors, including works in translation. We expect that our readers own dictionaries, and that they're not afraid to use them. We expect, in short, that our readers like to read, and, more, that they like words.

Since we're only writing space opera; it's possible that we're 'way too big for our britches, here, but we were long ago committed to the course.

So -- a slightly fuller explanation of the tension created by the edit letter -- necessary tension, which, if we managed to explain ourselves correctly, should be the basis, at last for a Liaden bible, and more consistently edited books.

And now, back to the couch!


...as you can see, my helpers are still on the case:

Tote bags! Word count!

Steve has been busy over on Cafe Press. Take a look at our new line of, um, things

Also? I wrote today. Good thing, too. Tomorrow is Monday and tomorrow night I must do SRM's 1099-Misc forms and get them in the mail. *is late and is guilty*

Progress on Ghost Ship:

31144 / 100000