Raether’s Enzyme passed a major milestone recently when its corrected manuscript returned from the proofreader. The first post on this blog marked its departure. I am happy to report that the editor did indeed spot remaining errors and called shenanigans on a stylistic experiment that did not pay off. The manuscript is stronger for it. Yay!

Reviewing the marked-up version of the manuscript revealed patterns of error that I will work to stamp out in future projects.

  • Truly embarrassing misplaced apostrophes.
  • Missing question marks.
  • Absent and misused commas.
  • Dropped articles that escaped my eye.

Finding a run of clean pages was a source of joy.

The proofreader identified and began correcting another class of errors. He saw a pattern emerging and began to wonder if I was playing a stylistic game, or if I really didn’t know what the past pluperfect was.

BUSTED. On both counts, really.

I would have lost on Jeopardy! if the clue had been:

“DENOTING AN ACTION COMPLETED PRIOR TO SOME
PAST POINT OF TIME SPECIFIED OR IMPLIED,
FORMED IN ENGLISH BY HAD AND THE PAST PARTICIPLE”

Raether’s Enzyme is written from the subjective third person limited point of view, where the character who is in focus can change between scenes. The narrator takes opportunities to reflect on events in the focal character’s past when those events are relevant to the action of the scene.

Raether imagines itself to be a thriller. Thrillers move relentlessly forward. The narrator’s interest in the characters’ pasts put forward momentum at risk. I had made a pass to purge the pluperfect in an attempt to hide the retrograde motion. I had rationalized this by telling myself that the remembering the narrator was doing on behalf of the characters was portraying the characters’ thought processes in the scene. My illusion of continuous forward motion caught fire in the eyes of an important reader: an editor.

My recent work in the manuscript included unwinding my de-pluperfect-ifying shenanigans. There are other games afoot that will add to your enjoyment without making you wonder what time it is. I am an important step closer to sharing them with you, thanks to my proofreader.