Keith and Sandy 'helping' me edit Every Vow You Break

First, my excuses for not posting in over a month – ‘very bad for the blogging profile’ according to internet wisdom.

1. Life: I’ve been busy packing Big’Uns off to University, preparing LittleSon for Secondary School and settling in my half-empty-nester consolation prize of two kittens named Keith and Sandy. While OldMan has been away, directing The Taming of the Shrew at the RSC (la di dah).
2. Work: I spent three weeks fine-tuning my second draft of Every Vow You Break for the line editor. And I wrote a short story for S Magazine. And I’ve been putting together ideas for the next two novels after novel#3, Bad Jean, which I have also been thinking about because I’m starting writing it next week.

So I got my line edits back and I am REALLY enjoying going through them. It feels at this stage as though that big morass of 125,000 words has taken shape, and the changes I am doing now – mostly those picked up by the line editor – are just adding a final polish.

I didn’t hit my target of having an unmarked manuscript returned with nothing to change, but there’s certainly less to do than there was on Cuckoo at this stage. Most of the corrections are house style things – like using all right instead of alright, and OK instead of okay. Things I should know but just forgot about. The frustrating part is that a lot of the changes are because somehow groups of words ran together in Headline’s print-out – something that wasn’t visible on screen, nor in print outs I have done here. I have no idea why this is (my graphic design instinct is that it’s a font thing), but I’m really sorry, copy editor – it must have been really annoying to have to mark up all those mistakes.

Anyway, I should have finished going through it all by Monday, and then it’s on to Bad Jean, which is glamorously set in the seaside town of  Tankerton – plenty of research opportunities to take me close to BigSon, who is partying on, I mean studying, at Kent University. I’m also sneaking in a couple of chapters in Southern Spain, which may require a visit at some point…

Oh, and tomorrow morning I’m on the sofa on BBC Breakfast, talking about NaNoWriMo, trying not to swear, trying not to forget what I’m saying mid-sentence and trying not to spout a load of bollocks. No pressure, then.