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Copy edits for Alliance

Alliance. Book 2 in the Linesman series
Alliance. Book 2 in the Linesman series

The copy edits for ALLIANCE arrived yesterday.

Oh, my.

We said we’d do better than we did with LINESMAN, and we did, but not by much.

At least the issues aren’t quite the same.

We knew we had to change our Australian spelling to US spelling at the end, but did we? No.

Realise, rumour and defence became realize, rumor and defense. Words like travelled and councillor became traveled and councilor.

There were still a few of the dreaded serial commas. That is, a comma before the ‘and’ in a list (aka the ‘Oxford comma’). But we were better this time.

In fact, we need to work on commas in general. And on our capitalisation. (Or should that be capitalization?)

Trust me, you think you have a good grasp of grammar, but when you see a good copy editor go through your manuscript you realise (realize) that what you think is a lot different to what you know.

We have a goal to get down to minimal copy edits on a 100,000 word novel. Under a hundred edits would be nice.

4 replies on “Copy edits for Alliance”

Hi Karen and Sherylyn, I just read Linesman because it was recommended by Ilona Andrews and I loved it, even though some concepts were definitely not the easiest to grasp. Can’t wait for Alliance! Btw, am currently on a holiday in Melbourne, how coincidental is that?

Welcome to Melbourne. We even turned on the nice weather for you. It’s been freezing here recently. Enjoy your stay. You picked a good time to be here. Grand Final time.

Glad you liked the book.

I just finished Linesman and liked it a lot — thank you! I loved the characterization of Ean and the description of his experience. While reading I found myself wondering about what his singing sounds like and coming up with various possibilities — qawwali? Tuvan throat-singing harmonics? Enya? — and would love to know how you imagine it.

Regarding spelling and punctuation… I’m sorry the publishers think my fellow Americans are such delicate, wilting flowers that we can’t handle alternative spellings. (Oxford/serial comma? LOVE IT. I grit my teeth every time I have to submit to my employer’s style guide, which says “no serial commas”.)

Warm regards. May your pencils always have lead, your pens always be full of non-splotchy ink, your printers always have toner, and your muse regularly speak to you. 🙂

Thank you, Lexica. Glad you enjoyed Linesman.

Re the singing. We both imagine it as a full vocal sound. Something that has to come through as more than just a single voice singing. But no particular set person/sound.

We listened to a lot of Enya, Lisa Gerrard (with Hans Zimmer), Era and big movie themes (with a strong vocal component) around the time we were writing Linesman, and that probably subconsciously influenced what we imagine the sound to be.

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