I was supposed to get the proof to my editor by today, so technically I guess I wasn’t late. But still, I thought I’d have it done much earlier. As it was, I was rushing to get it done by this afternoon.
It was both harder and easier than I expected. Harder, because I’m a perfectionist. I kept going over it slowly, trying not to miss anything. I corrected a major grammar mistake (accidentally using a word twice) and fixed a sentence, after Erich pointed out that it would read smoother as one sentence with a colon, rather than two separate sentences.
But ultimately it was easier than I was making it, because I was tweaking sentences here and there, correcting awkward phrasing. And when I was done with all of that, I re-read my editor’s injunction to not do that, at this stage, because there wasn’t time for rewriting along those lines. So I threw it all out. Or most of it. There was one sentence where I’d commented on the smell of rotten flesh at the scene of a burned farmstead. That one absolutely had to go. Iceland in the middle of December would be far too cold for anything to be rotting. Corpses would freeze within a day or two, and certainly my hero wouldn’t be able to smell anything.
Luckily, my editor appeared to accept that correction. I won’t be ridiculed for that bit of foolishness. Some of my dialog, on the other hand…
Ah, well. It’s out of my hands now. And overall, it’s a good story. But it’s always tempting to keep tweaking.
When I get my galley proof of the novella — in a few weeks, I gather — I’ll only have about seven days to go through it, so I’ll have to be faster than I was this time around.
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