Polishing

 

if it were easy, everyone would be doing it...

It seems I have written all the essays my 'muse' insisted I write.  My alpha reader has returned the edits, which I have used to update my copy.  And now?  

Polishing.

In spite of the original writing, my initial editing, my alpha reader editing, now that I am preparing the files for my final editor, I am reading through them all *again* - because enough time has passed I have a little perspective - and editing *again*.

That's right.  I am editing them all *again*.  

The point is clarity and enough time has passed for me to have forgotten what I wrote initially, and I can better see the inconsistency and any lack of clarity.  It's not a huge change anywhere, just a word here or there, an errant apostrophe or comma to be cleaned up.

I'm quite sure my official editor will have thoughts as well.

It was important to me to have editors who knew how to weave and the correct spellings of weaving terms.  I have had a couple of books 'spoiled' when the word 'dying' was used when it was clearly the word 'dyeing' that was the correct word.

I've had interactions with people who confidently declared that 'dying' was a perfectly good word.  I told them that yes, it was, but when you mean adding colour to a yarn, dyEing was the correct spelling.

It was quite amusing because for months afterward they used exactly that - dyEing - in their posts which really brought attention to the correct spelling and probably did more to raise awareness than my pointing it out in the first place.

I suspect there are still a few things my editor will adjust but I'm trying to give her clean copy - or as clean as I can make it.  This effort will take about 6+ hours, and I can't do them all at once.  I've just completed 3 and find myself starting to glaze over.  It is time to go do something else for a while.

Editing isn't something that can be rushed and doing it while brain fog is present is an exercise is futility.  Or at least, frustration.  

So I'm going to go to the studio and weave a towel and clear my head.  I have a number of 'deadlines' coming up and I need to stay focused.