Marching onwards...
Copy-editing and administrative challenges are contained in what looks set to be my final update before I hand in my final draft manuscript.
If I actually had the time right now to do it, I’d love to take on more paid copy-editing work. In the second half of the last decade, I spent a fair amount of time editing news articles written for my university’s student newspaper (including a handful of print editions), as well as pieces for a now-defunct online magazine dedicated to Internet culture. Being a couple of shades of neurodivergent, I suspect my love of tweaking articles speaks to my love of perfectionism and scratches a rather pedantic itch.
This is where I find myself, with a few extra days added to a deadline which was initially meant to be yesterday, 31 March.
For many reasons, I’m kind of glad that that didn’t turn out to be my actual deadline. First and foremost, it was my birthday, and I was preoccupied with the existential dread which comes with being another year older, as well as a trip to review the press night performance of For Black Boys… at the Apollo Theatre (OK, but seriously, it’s absolutely incredible - London readers, go and see it).
Reviewing theatre shows has meant that I’ve had to squeeze in edits to my manuscript on journeys to and from the theatre, on cramped Thameslink trains where I balance the 200-odd pages precariously on my lap as I wreak havoc with my red editing pen. As it stands, I’m about halfway through the read through, and thankfully I now have a few days free next week to really sit down and finish the rest of them.
Interestingly, unlike other creative endeavours, sitting down to edit my first non-fiction book has not prompted my inner critic to tell me how terrible my writing is. Previous attempts at writing fiction - where I edited as I went, which was probably a fatal error - were often cut short because I soon dismissed my ideas as being boring and uninteresting. At least in this instance, I’m writing a book on a subject about which I’m passionate, which is mostly made up of contributions from other brilliant people. My inner critic can’t exactly say that said quotes are rubbish, as that would, genuinely, be false - and mean.
Speaking of contributions, the other challenge this month has been the final bits of book admin. I’m talking about references (the Harvard kind which I thought I left behind at university), and permission forms, which I’m required to obtain from everyone I’ve interviewed. I could only send them out to people in the middle of March, as that was when I had locked down what quotes I would be using from every interviewee. Thankfully, both of these tasks are now complete.
So now it falls on me to sort out the book’s acknowledgements, content list and copy edits before a new deadline of 11 April. You’ve all been bloody marvellous in nudging me towards writing all the words, but if you could do the same with getting me to scrawl changes over the last 100 pages of my book which I’ve printed out, that would be grand, and then the accountability part of this monthly newsletter can come to an end.
Until next time…