American Gods Blog, Post 11

I'd post more, but there's nothing in the world as dull as an author going over a copy-edited manuscript. I finished chapter eight today. The copy editor's done a very solid job. Occasionally I wish that he'd queried things instead of just fixed them (Mad Sweeney, for example, who claims when drunk to be Irish and a leprechaun, says "fucken" a lot. The copy editor has carefully gone through and carefully changed every "fucken" to "fuckin' ", figuring, I suppose, that I just didn't know how it was spelled.)

When you see things fixed that weren't broken, you write STET in the margin in green pencil. Mostly, you just nod and are happy that someone caught your goofs before it went to press. You'd be astonished at the number of different ways I'd managed to spell McDonald's in one small book. Well, one quite big book, actually, but the point holds.

Labels: American Gods, American Gods Blog, copy editing