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Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Inaugural post

The MS of The Last Giant: Transgression, volume 1 in the Last Giant trilogy, is complete and will be undergoing the first round of joint editing very soon. After that, it will go out to our Beta readers for two weeks, then will come back to us for the final edit, which we do jointly as well. Then....off to the publisher!

The books moves around Menannon, who by the end of the book, is indeed the last Giant on the world of Linden. The 'transgression' referred to in the title is something that someone else does, and you can be sure that in time, there will be retribution.

You can find more information about the world of Linden at Golden Cocker Press and at Purple Mammoth Publishing LLC.

We write as a team. Jan writes the initial draft of a chapter, then passes it on to me. I edit it, by which I mean not just copy edit, but I chop, hack. move things around, add and re-write. There are times when the results don't look anything like what she wrote, but usually that isn't the case. It will have changed, yes, but not drastically. When I'm finished with all chapters, we move on to Phase II.

In Phase II, one of us reads the MS while the other listens. It is surprising what comes of reading a text aloud. This reading often results in some intense discussion and some major changes. One of the things that often pops up and becomes glaringly obvious is what we term a "continuity glitch." Things like a character leaving the island before he gets on the ship. It usually isn't that bad, but we can feel pretty stupid when we tumble to such a thing. It's like the "hand-no hand" slip-up in Boromir's death scene in Fellowship of the Rings (the movie, of course). Next time you run it, watch carefully when the camera switches back and forth from Boromir to Strider/Aragorn. When you are looking at Aragorn, Boromir has his right hand on Aragorn's left shoulder in a strong grip, his fingers clearly over the top and onto Aragorn's back. When the camera shifts so you are looking at Boromir over Aragorn's back...no hand, no fingers! Well, we can fix a continuity glitch easily. It's not so easy in a movie.

All right, with Phase II complete, off it goes to our Beta readers. We have a stable of marvelous readers who can be pretty savage if need be, and we rely on them to keep us on the straight and narrow. We let them have the MS for about two weeks, then we take their feed-back and go back to work. After we've addressed any issues brought up and possibly a few new things we've come up with, we leave it alone for about a week and move on to other things, like the next book.

After the waiting week, we once again go over it orally as before, then I give it a final copy edit. After that, she is done, and off to the publisher it goes.

The other half of this team has just announced that she has a cup of coffee about ready, so I shall sign off here, kick back and enjoy the java. Yrgacheffe, it is, and I love it.

--Richard

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