What are you working on today? #WIPWEDNESDAY. Behind the scenes at Cherry Edits.

#WIPWEDNESDAY – Work in Progress Wednesday

Here’s what I’m up to today. I’m currently on page 481 of 531 of an indie fantasy copyedit. The manuscript is 126166 words. It’s such a brilliant story. I’m gripped and am just past the climax. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how things are resolved.

On the left screen (blurred out) is the actual manuscript. You can maybe just make out that I’ve got Track Changes enabled. My author will be able to accept or reject the edits I’ve made when I return the manuscript to him next week.

On the right screen (blurred out) is the style sheet I’ve created to go with the edit. It’s based on a template provided by Louise Harnby — if you’ve come across her resources before. She’s amazing. She is the one who does the Editing Podcast with Denise Cowle. Definitely check this out if you haven’t already. Such a wealth of info and an interesting back catalogue of episodes.

Anyway, the style sheet, as I was saying, is something I’ve adapted from Louise’s freely shared original. On it I take down details about, e.g. whether the author uses iz or is spellings in words like organisation/organization; whether they’re going with kneeled/knelt; while/whilst etc. There are also sections on punctuation such as whether the author is using the Oxford (serial comma) or not. Whether speech marks are double or single. How numbers are styled. Stuff like that.

This style sheet is currently a huge 67 pages because I’ve also been keeping notes on characters and geography and storyline. As a result of compiling this, I’ve managed to spot that a character’s eyes were one colour, then another. And that another character’s name was spelt in inconsistent ways in different chapters. I’m also keeping detailed notes about geography to make sure that everything makes sense and is in order.

So, yeah, that’s me and that’s my Wednesday. I will be spending about four hours on this today. I’ll be using Word’s Read Aloud function to make sure that I don’t have any blindspots for missing words or transposed letters. It’s such a good help.

Let me know what you’re doing today.