It's home stretch time for copy edits. I need to be finished with them by tomorrow evening so I can get them packaged up and ready to Fed Ex back to NYC on Thursday during my lunch hour. I'm on the final read through of the story now, making minor changes for smoothness or to get rid of duplicate words. These are really hard for me because they read so naturally and sometimes there is no synonym that conveys the right tone the same way the word that's duplicated does.
Take settle for example. The bad guy wasn't going to settle for this existence. Okay, find a word that means the same thing and shows his determination and resolve. I couldn't and I ditzed around with both sentences for awhile trying to reword/rework them so that I wasn't using settle twice on the same page. I can't remember if I decided to leave it as it was or if I finally came up with some way to eliminate one of the usages. I went through a lot of pages and hit a fair number of things like this.
Of course, this leads me to wonder if the connotation I give to words is the same that most people associate with them. Do others attach the same implications/emotions to settle? I don't know. The other question that arises is do most people even notice something like this when they read? Do they care that I spent half an hour on a single word? Something to mull over, I guess.
Anyway, the hard work on the copy edits was done this weekend. I only have one copy editor query left to answer, but it's not a difficult one as far as changing the story goes. It is difficult for me, though. I can't make a decision. Do I put it back to the phrase I had? Do I leave in the word the copy editor replaced it with? Or do I rewrite it entirely to something different? I'm not sure yet. I guess I'll make the decision when I reach that point in my reread.
Time pressure continues along with copy edits. Email is backed up, comments are going unanswered on my blogs, I stayed up too late last night and overslept this morning and that puts me farther behind because all the email I take care of in the morning didn't get handled before I left for the Evil Day Job (EDJ).
Two more days, counting today.
