Stone

I always anticipate the editing process as I regard it as the "final chance". Writing is such a solitary occupation. While writing, you spend so much time with your characters and worlds, changing, revising, rearranging that you sometimes lose site of where you are.

In the editing process, your editor points out the errors in your way. Heh. Sometimes, the errors are truly incredible. Sometimes, they're the victims of revision. In my current book, there was a detail at the very end that I completely missed when doing the revisions. It was one of those "huh?" moments you read in books and wonder what the author was thinking.

I will never forget a book I read a looooong time ago. On one page, the heroine was wearing a pair of pants. Two pages later, the hero was removing her skirt. And nowhere in that two pages did she change clothes. At the time, it was a real head-scratcher.

Now, I understand perfectly how such a thing could happen. I suspect it was what I call a revision victim. You change this. And then you change that. And then if you're not careful... you have a revision victim--one of those tiny details that somehow are missed in the over-all picture.

Fortunately, our books are not written in stone. Fortunately, we have that "final chance" to catch the last minute errors and make changes. That's what editing is all about.

anny