I handed my copy edits in today which means I’ll only get to see Shadow Kin one more time before it’s in print, when I do page proofs. At the page proof stage, you’re only really meant to fix errors, not make any significant changes in the text, so this was really the last chance to tweak things. Luckily I didn’t feel like I really needed to, apart from the odd sentence here and there. Phew.

Most of the changes made by the copyeditor were for US-AUS grammar/punctuation differences…I thought I’d done fairly well on this in the revisions and line edits but there were still a few things that tripped me up. Serial commas being one of them. We don’t usually use them in Australia and they look really wrong to me but that’s part of the joy of writing for a different country. Hopefully I can learn to put them in as I type (though then I’ll get in trouble for using them in the day job!). It was interesting though to see that there were still a few missing/wrong word type errors despite the fact that I’ve read this manuscript umpteen times, it had been line edited by my editor and gone over for line edits again by me. This is part of what a publisher does for you, stops you looking like a dill because your eyes just can’t see the errors any more.

So with Shadow Kin mostly done, now it’s back to trying to crack on with the draft of book three…I’d really like to finish the dirty draft by the end of May which is doable if I crack the whip and utilise the wonders of Write or Die to do sprints and kick the word count along. Might be time to haul out the old metrics again, to keep me on the straight and narrow!

My website design is coming along too, so hopefully later next month, we’ll have fab new digs around here! Now must go write so I can watch the royal wedding tonight with a clean conscience!