After two heads-down weeks, the final manuscript is scrawled on in purple pen, tippexed until it is stiff, photocopied at vast expense and put in the post to my publisher.

I am in awe at the copy-editor’s art. Such skill and knowledge. There are very few suggestions that I disagree with.

It is an eye-opener. For one thing, I don’t hyphenate. Not hardly at all. So a large part of the job is to insert hyphens. I also put in too many commas, so a lot are taken out. There are a few house styley things like all right, which I have always written as alright, and leaned rather than leant, learned rather than learnt. There are only about five typos, which is very good, apparently, but I am shocked by the following:

The annexe is up some steps from the house, but you often refer to it as ‘down at the annexe’ and ‘up at the house’ So it’s trawling through 500 pages of A4 for instances of down and up and amending them accordingly. My eyes hurt. My brain hurts.

You use ‘he/she smiled’ too often where ‘he/she said’ would be better. And I thought I had specifically NOT done this, as it breaks one of my personal good writing rules. Using word search, I find over 30 instances. Who wrote this?

I realise that the baby has a cot at the end of the main characters’ bed AND sleeps in a bedroom downstairs!!!
So I sort it out. the baby starts off in her own bedroom, then she is ill, so they move the cot into their bedroom, then the mother can’t bear to have her as far away as the cot, so takes her into bed with her, then the redundant cot is moved back to the baby’s original bedroom. Phew. How did they do it before track changes and apple F?

I used  mitigating as its exact opposite meaning. That is barely literate.

I use like instead of as if: eg, she looked like she was going to throw up. Should be she looked as if she was going to throw up (and no, it seems that it doesn’t have to be she looked as if she were going to throw up).

I can have Nooo!!! but not Noooo!!!!

And my favourite: The sex scene on page 429 uses pushing/push too many times. I raid the synonym larder.