Re: Final Revision Checklist
Jim and others:
Do you have a list of final things you check before submitting a manuscript?
I check to make sure all the pages are there and nothing horrible has happened to the formatting (like chapter twenty-two being printed in 8-point Garish, and everything from page 403 to the end underlined). Sometimes the running headers get screwed up in entertaining ways.
By the time I submit a manuscript I've read it so often I'm sick of it. Darn-near have it memorized. And how it feels to me is boring.
Really, read The Unstrung Harp. That'll tell you the truth.
But I can tell you a funny story.
As some of you may know, I write with my wife. And as others of you know, we live in far northern New Hampshire.
There we were. We'd finished Starpilot's Grave (a fine book; everyone should buy a dozen -- they make excellent gifts).
It was all printed out, tidily boxed, all's well. We were driving down to New York to spend the night at my mother's house, then take the train into New York City to meet our editor for lunch (and when editors take authors to expense-account lunches, it's worth the drive from far northern New Hampshire). Besides, the deadline was the next day (nothing like cutting it close).
And as we drove out of town, I turned to my wife and casually said, "You know, the middle doesn't work."
"Arrrghhhh!" she agreed with me.
Fortunately we had the novel on disk with us, and the computer with us, and the printer with us. (These were letter-quality dot-matrix days ... show of hands, kiddies, do you remember them?)
By the time we reached New York some seven hours later, we'd sort-of figured out what to do ... add a space battle. To reveal character, advance the plot, and support the theme.
It wasn't just adding one chapter, though. All the foreshadowing had to go into the earlier chapters, and all the results had to go into the subsequent chapters. It changed everything.
So.... first thing I did on arrival was sit down and write about twenty pages of original text, while Debra went through the first chapters and marked where the foreshadowing would have to go. Then while she was re-writing the new chapter and changing the first part of the book, I and my red-pencil were adding, deleting, and changing stuff in the back end of the book.
Now you all recall that dot matrix printers were slow in those days -- especially when you switched 'em to Letter Quality. Debra was still entering the changes in Chapter Two when we started Chapter One printing. And I figured how fast the pages were coming out, and calculated that at the current printing rate, we'd just catch our train.
This seemed to be working fairly well, right up until the safety feature on the printer clicked in.
It seemed that if the print-head got too hot, the printer would pause until it cooled, to keep from burning out the printer. It was August, a hot sticky night in August. And the safety feature shut down the printer. At that moment, we didn't care about the darned print head -- we could get a new printer if this one burned out -- what we didn't have was time.
Taking the lid off the printer so it wouldn't trap heat didn't help -- they had a cute little safety interlock to keep the printer from working while the lid was off.
Which is how that printer wound up with its lid off, with a paperclip jammed into the safety interlock, and a fan blowing at the print head.
We made the train (though I spent the trip into the city pulling the ears off the paper -- that was in the day of fan-fold sproket-drive computer paper). I noticed one typo on the way, corrected it with pen, and continued. The edges of the paper went into a wastebasket at Grand Central.
But we made it.
Well, I thought it was a funny story, anyway....
Jim and others:
Do you have a list of final things you check before submitting a manuscript?
I check to make sure all the pages are there and nothing horrible has happened to the formatting (like chapter twenty-two being printed in 8-point Garish, and everything from page 403 to the end underlined). Sometimes the running headers get screwed up in entertaining ways.
By the time I submit a manuscript I've read it so often I'm sick of it. Darn-near have it memorized. And how it feels to me is boring.
Really, read The Unstrung Harp. That'll tell you the truth.
But I can tell you a funny story.
As some of you may know, I write with my wife. And as others of you know, we live in far northern New Hampshire.
There we were. We'd finished Starpilot's Grave (a fine book; everyone should buy a dozen -- they make excellent gifts).
It was all printed out, tidily boxed, all's well. We were driving down to New York to spend the night at my mother's house, then take the train into New York City to meet our editor for lunch (and when editors take authors to expense-account lunches, it's worth the drive from far northern New Hampshire). Besides, the deadline was the next day (nothing like cutting it close).
And as we drove out of town, I turned to my wife and casually said, "You know, the middle doesn't work."
"Arrrghhhh!" she agreed with me.
Fortunately we had the novel on disk with us, and the computer with us, and the printer with us. (These were letter-quality dot-matrix days ... show of hands, kiddies, do you remember them?)
By the time we reached New York some seven hours later, we'd sort-of figured out what to do ... add a space battle. To reveal character, advance the plot, and support the theme.
It wasn't just adding one chapter, though. All the foreshadowing had to go into the earlier chapters, and all the results had to go into the subsequent chapters. It changed everything.
So.... first thing I did on arrival was sit down and write about twenty pages of original text, while Debra went through the first chapters and marked where the foreshadowing would have to go. Then while she was re-writing the new chapter and changing the first part of the book, I and my red-pencil were adding, deleting, and changing stuff in the back end of the book.
Now you all recall that dot matrix printers were slow in those days -- especially when you switched 'em to Letter Quality. Debra was still entering the changes in Chapter Two when we started Chapter One printing. And I figured how fast the pages were coming out, and calculated that at the current printing rate, we'd just catch our train.
This seemed to be working fairly well, right up until the safety feature on the printer clicked in.
It seemed that if the print-head got too hot, the printer would pause until it cooled, to keep from burning out the printer. It was August, a hot sticky night in August. And the safety feature shut down the printer. At that moment, we didn't care about the darned print head -- we could get a new printer if this one burned out -- what we didn't have was time.
Taking the lid off the printer so it wouldn't trap heat didn't help -- they had a cute little safety interlock to keep the printer from working while the lid was off.
Which is how that printer wound up with its lid off, with a paperclip jammed into the safety interlock, and a fan blowing at the print head.
We made the train (though I spent the trip into the city pulling the ears off the paper -- that was in the day of fan-fold sproket-drive computer paper). I noticed one typo on the way, corrected it with pen, and continued. The edges of the paper went into a wastebasket at Grand Central.
But we made it.
Well, I thought it was a funny story, anyway....
Mind you, I can't remember any more if there were hand hair dryers at the time of dot-matrix printers and fan-fold paper (yes, I remember them, it was the same time as I went to "computer programming courses" at high school -- the said "computers" were red boxes as big as a room and were fed programs on what looked like oversized index cards...)