Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: freelance

The Gray God’s Editing Odyssey

April 11, 2022 /
Witch's Jelly/Butter.

Absolutely not from outer space.

Almost three years ago, The Gray God reached its Narrative Complete milestone.  I had a story with kids, cults, and monsters. It was okay, but very much an early draft. I put it on the back burner while I prepared Raether’s Enzyme for submission to literary agents and then self-publishing. My mushroom monsters simmered all the while, getting varying amounts of editorial love, evolving into something that you might want to read. This is the story of that evolution.

Reader Zero

A good friend volunteered to read the Narrative Complete draft. This was a generous offer given that he has negative interest in stories featuring young people making bad decisions. He returned with numerous useful notes and keen observations, the most important of which was that my main character was playing hard-to-like too well. I had intended Pete to be rough-edged. You don’t get into his sort of troubles by being a shining beacon of humanity. Nonetheless, the reader wants to either feel for the character, look forward to his downfall, or secretly revel in his transgressions. Fixing Pete to Reader Zero’s satisfaction wasn’t in the cards, but I resolved to smooth and soften some of the kid’s rougher edges.

The Real First Draft

The Gray God sim-sim-simmered. I reread it and studied the distribution of word counts across its chapters and acts. Some of the chapters ran long. I identified new chapter breaks, which gave scenes more room to breathe. When I look at the chapter breakdown now, it seems like it’s the way it always should have been.

The ending was too short. It wasn’t strange or horrible enough. I had teased monsters, alien horrors, and certain conflicts, but the pay-off was perfunctory. I split the final chapter in two and did my best to deliver blood, gore, madness, and cosmic horror.

As I made these changes, I kept an eye on the growing word count. The sages of the internet recommend that horror novels weigh in at 80,000 words or less to have the best chance of acceptance by agents and publishers.

My second courageous early reader took The Gray God home and returned with helpful notes and positive feedback. The characters worked as I’d hoped, as did a plot twist I was particularly happy with, in an evil way.

Wise of the Machines

Bad writing is noise that obscures the signal of the story. Computers can’t identify plot holes, weak characterization, wooden dialog, or a host of other story flaws, but they’re pretty good at spotting typos, misspellings, some grammatical errors, and overuse of words. Playing to the strengths of the machines, I enlisted Word, Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, and AutoCrit to filter out some of the bad writing noise than was fuzzing my story. None of these tools plug into Scrivener, so the process included exporting (compiling) the Scrivener project into a Word document for analysis. Errors and improvements then had to be made in the Scrivener project.

At the end of the process, I had a reasonably clean 80,000-word manuscript. I was ready for the next step in my insidious plan.

The Voice of the Outer World

Reducing the noise to expose the story was important for the next step: Developmental Editing. In a developmental edit, the editor is looking at how well the story works and provides feedback on the plot, characters, tones, themes, and general story quality of the manuscript. Any editor you’d want to hire for this service should have industry experience. That means they’ll have a keen eye for writing errors. It will probably be difficult for them to silence their inner copyeditors. To make it easier for them to focus on the story, it behooves one to deliver as clean a manuscript as practicable.

Developmental editing was a step I skipped for Raether’s Enzyme. It was important to me that Raether be my story—sink or swim—from beginning to end. I’m not as protective of The Gray God. It’s a more conventional—and possibly commercial—story. I went into the developmental edit intent on improving it in the direction of salability.

I returned to Reedsy to find a freelance developmental editor who worked with horror.

Ambitious amateur tip: Line up your developmental editor well in advance.

Of the three best matches for my project, one couldn’t take on a new project and the other two were booked months out. After toying with the idea of enlisting the other two, I settled on one and arranged for The Gray God to pass under her red pen later in the summer.

Once the ball was rolling, I soon had an editorial assessment, matching developmental notes for the manuscript, and some quality copy edits (she said she couldn’t help but fix errors when she saw them).

Her assessment highlighted what worked in the story and outlined areas for improvement with specific examples drawn from the text. It was well-written and full of actionable insights that I’ll apply to future projects.

Her manuscript edit was thorough and clear. I know what scenes and passages worked well for her. She flagged each point where the plot, setting, or character motivation was unclear. All the issues summarized in the assessment were noted in the Word comments with precision and the encouragement and coaching I need to make the story better for readers.

There was much to think about and to do. Specific issues called for delicate surgery in situ. The editorial assessment called out general patterns of weakness. I was light on character and scene descriptions. The longer dialog scenes drifted out into voids, unanchored by place or motion. It was a fair cop. I needed to fortify the descriptions and break up the dialog with meaningful actions. My inner screenwriter had delegated those details to the set and costume designers, and the actors, respectively. It was a problem I needed to fix.

Plot complication: The manuscript was already at the upper end of the word count for my genre. I consulted the editor and she said I could cheat it up to 85,000 words if I did it well. Doing it well (I hope!) and under budget required finesse. And removing a whole scene. Five hundred words mattered. The final total was just under 85,000 words. I won’t lie. I kept tinkering until I hit the limit.

The Chicago Way

The winner of a Clash of Copyeditors had an opening in her schedule and I jumped right in. She worked her diligent, painstaking magic to cleanse my manuscript of error and bring it into the light of The Chicago Manual of Style. She noted where things were unclear and offered improved word choices. The Gray God is mightier for her efforts.

I had come into a new pattern of error, which I will blame on Word. Word had been encouraging me to omit commas before conjunctions where the clauses were short. This may be what’s hip for business writing these days, but it is not the Chicago way. And given the alternative of sticking with Word’s suggestion or the corrections of a professional editor, I had to go with my editor. I spent a good long time porting commas back into the Scrivener project.

Another place where Chicago and my manuscript differed was on capitalization. Chicago has deprecated the capitalization of Marine, Army, Navy, and Air Force as stand-alone terms. That doesn’t strike me as right. And it would likely…disappoint…friends of mine who are veterans of those services. As used in the story, these words are short for United States Marine, United States Army, United States Navy, and United States Air Force. Those are capitalized.

Chicago has also chosen to not capitalize God’s pronouns and epithets. I get the idea of not capitalizing these words as a matter of secular style. When they occur in dialog from religious characters, I think capitalization should apply.

If I wind up self-publishing The Gray God, I’ll have the last word on these controversies, at least within the scope of my book.

My editor also informed me that in the interest of inclusivity, words from other languages are no longer set off in italics. There are always trade-offs.

The Package

A clean, polished manuscript is a fine thing to have, but delivering it to an agent or publisher comes after you pitch the book via a query letter. The Gray God needed a short, punchy query letter to intrigue the industry folks, or at least let us all know that the book isn’t what they can risk their time championing before gatekeepers further down the line. Some agents also want to see a short synopsis that lays out the main beats and ending of the story. Spoilers be damned! The manuscript, query letter, synopsis, and author biography form the package of documents you need to have ready before you submit your first query.

The Gray God’s package is complete. It is time.

A Dance with Designers

September 23, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In A Clash of Copyeditors, two talented freelance editors improved my Raether’s Enzyme manuscript and I then struggled to merge their edits into a final draft. I bought my own copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and verified that we now use the lower-case internet. There was much rejoicing.

Two is Good. Three is Better. Right?

Clash’s dual-slit copyeditor experiment went well enough that I was keen to try it again with the cover and interior design. I liked Reedsy as a place to connect with freelance professionals but it was too early to put all my eggs in their walled garden. One of my eggs, yes. The other I would entrust to someone else. Someone out there.

Be careful for what you wish for. To that end, I started my search with the following criteria in place and immutable:

  • One stop shop. For the cover, interior, and eBook to be consistent, I wanted one designer (or team) to develop all three. Typography on the cover should inform the interior. On a more concrete level, the dimensions of a paperback’s cover spine depends on the page count of the interior.
  • Genre agility. Raether’s DNA contains thriller, sci-fi, and a dash of superhero story. The designer portfolios I was looking for needed breadth. There are artists and studios out there who can land your cover solidly within the romance, science fiction, or fantasy spaces. I was looking for an artist who could compose from a multi-genre palette.
  • License free. Once I had the completed work, I needed to be free to use it without accounting for additional use fees. You know, in case I sell too many books.
  • I strive to be clear and forthright in my dealings. I prepared a project brief describing scope and challenges as I saw them. The designers I wanted to work with would cite details or ask pertinent questions in the course of formulating their offers.

The project brief I sent to each designer began thus:

Short version

Cover and interior design for eBook and print. 114,000-word manuscript. Mixed genre – a contemporary thriller with elements of science fiction and superhero origin story. Includes text messages, email, simple tables, and a few other stylistic flourishes that preclude direct application of a template.

I am exploring this process for the first time. I may hire more than one designer. In that scenario you would be paid in full and thanked profusely but might not see your contribution to the book go to market.

The long version goes on from there into spoilers territory.

After a long search, I landed on a book design site that I liked. Their portfolio was diverse and included authors that I recognized. The prices were higher than I expected and did not include eBook formatting in the package that was otherwise right for my project. There was space for my brief in the request-a-quote form, so I added it. I clicked submit and waited to hear back via email. The response was disappointing. Boilerplate outlined a cover and interior package that started out $500 more expensive than the package I had asked about. That base figure covered a page count that was much smaller than I knew Raether would need. The quote disagreed with the web site and indifferent to the details I had provided. I chose to go no further.

I approached the next design site with the same brief and more trepidation. Unnecessary trepidation. The designer (interior) had read the brief and asked to see the manuscript to better set the bid. These were folks I could work with. I had my non-Reedsy design team.

All this while, I had encoded most of my criteria into Reedsy’s marketplace search queries and spent many hours reviewing bios and portfolios. After much sifting and sorting I got it down to two candidates. One had a strong, broad portfolio and a background that fit the project well. The other had a distinctive distinctiveness to his work. I wanted to see what he would do with the project. I requested quotes from both. Be careful what you wish for. They were both available. Both were interested in the project and attentive to its requirements. Both were fair and reasonable in their offers. Dangerously reasonable. As in: I could hire both of them for what that first design site was asking. So that’s what I did.

Dosado and Away We Go

Every dance has certain steps. The copyediting dance is relatively simple. The writer presents the editor with a manuscript and any notes that might be helpful. The editor may in time respond with questions about the manuscript’s idiosyncrasies. The editor delivers a version of the manuscript with their recommended changes tracked by Word. The writer happily clicks ‘Accept’ on 95% of the changes and agonizes over whether the remain errors are something super clever and special. The dance partners thank each other and move on.

The book design dance is more involved and iterative. The steps I observed while collaborating with all three teams went like so:

  1. The writer supplies the manuscript, notes about what they are looking for, and examples of relevant cover art.
  2. The designer creates two or more preliminary cover designs.
  3. The writer spends a day thrilled with and fascinated by the designer’s imagination and skill.
  4. The writer agonizes about which design to choose.
  5. The writer picks one design to move forward and writes up their thoughts on the cover.
  6. The designer evolves the cover in response to the writer’s notes and delivers one or more variations of the core cover.
  7. Repeat steps 5 and 6. The designers I worked with offered more than one revision as part of their services. If you need more than three, chances are there’s a communication problem or you don’t really know what you’re looking for.
  8. The writer signs off on the cover design.
  9. The designer takes the manuscript, front matter (copyright, dedication, etc.), back matter (acknowledgments, author bio, etc.) and instructions from the writer and combines them into a print-ready PDF.
  10. The writer reviews the PDF and responds with any notes and corrections.
  11. The designer updates the PDF in response.
  12. Repeat steps 10 and 11 as needed. (Raether needed due to its formatting extravagances.)
  13. The writer signs off on the interior. The page count is now known and fixed.
  14. Optional: Paperback full cover design. Skip if the project is eBook only.
    1. The writer supplies back cover blurb text and ISBN number.
    2. The designer extends the cover design to include the spine and back cover with barcode.
    3. The writer reviews the full cover design and responds with notes.
    4. The designer updates the full cover design.
    5. Repeat steps c and d as needed.
    6. The writer signs off on the full cover.
  15. Optional: eBook interior design. This is like the print interior design, with EPUB files taking the place of the print-ready PDF.

Working with one designer, a manuscript with conventional formatting, and a story with clear genre, this dance is intricate but the choreography is straight-forward. Working with three designers on a more complex manuscript (by novel standards), a mixed genre story, and consulting with my beta readers, is where the dosado comes in. From my perspective, it was more of a square dance than a waltz. I was switching partners, repeating steps, and listening for the next call. The extra work was rewarded with sustained excitement.

The Covers

In the first draft of this post, I went into detail about dance Steps 1 through 8. I described each of the cover candidates, my reactions to them, and which ones I chose to develop and why. That was the right thing to do for a private journal and the wrong thing to do for a blog post. While I had anonymized the designers, I was still exposing details of our collaborative dialog and painting with words works-in-progress that were not intended for a wide audience. To put it lightly: It was unprofessional. To put it honestly: I was betraying the designer’s trust.

Allow me to summarize. Each design team started with the manuscript, some notes, and a link to the educational saga of my own attempt at designing the book. The preliminary designs were exciting and diverse. Each artist found their own themes to emphasize and each of these pictures spoke a thousand words about what I had written. Each was a key with the potential to unlock the interest of readers who will enjoy the book. Studying the designs and writing feedback for the artists sharpened my understanding of what I was looking for. Picking one design from each team to develop forced me to separate what I wanted and liked from what the book needed. Reaching Step 8 was an awesome milestone, repeated three times.

Here are five of the things I learned during this part of the dance:

  • Don’t over-specify the design. What the designers created was far more interesting and original than what I had in my head. I put that creativity at risk by sharing too many of my own thoughts. If the designer’s process includes reading the manuscript, let the story itself make the suggestions.
  • Write good feedback on all the preliminary designs. You’ll only develop one, but what you loved about the others (and what didn’t quite work) will inform the evolution of your preferred cover. Getting your reactions and reasoning down in writing clarifies your thinking.
  • Putting your characters on the cover is hard. I read that without searching out a model and commissioning a photo shoot, you aren’t going to get a great match for features, expressions, or poses. This turned out to be true. Working with glimpses, abstractions, or silhouettes can put your protagonist on the cover without stealing the one of the most important things the reader imagines.
  • Test the designs at thumbnail size. Beautiful, subtle images and typography weaken when the cover is one of many thumbnails the reader is browsing through an online catalog. Unless or until the reader is looking for your book, the cover has to do its work when it’s small.
  • Favor fuel over maps when providing feedback. Inspire change rather than direct it. Request amplification or reduction of emotions instead of dictating new design elements. Identify problems in terms that allow the designer to find the solution. I did make some very specific requests. “Could we see the apostrophe more clearly?” The most nit-picky was: “Could we increase the kerning here?” Picking of nits should be the exception, not the rule.

On to the Interior

Dancing with designers inside the book’s cover is less emotional than the cover design. Absent interior illustrations, it’s all about layout, typography, and getting the fine details right. Some people have passionate opinions about fonts and might argue with their designer over which style of Baskerville to use for the body text. I’m not one of those people. Each design team picked a different set of fonts and all are pleasing to my eye. For a novel with the usual mix of narration and dialog, the first version of the interior may be the final one. Reviewing might catch widows and orphans, which are easily fixed.

Raether features stylings for which there appear to be no industry standards: dialog via text messages, email, and Slack chats. Its scene breaks take the form of headlines culled from the internet. These features presented a creative challenge for the designers. I had solutions for these problems and corresponding Word styles for the manuscript. The trick was to make them clear and pleasing on the printed page. As a general rule, a novel uses one font in its body text. There may be bold face in the chapter headings and occasional italics. After seeing the text messages in the main font, I asked the designers to use a sans serif font, like the ones you’re used to seeing on your devices, for all the electronic communication. This made the transitions between the digital world and the regular narrative clear.

The text messages were not done making trouble. In the manuscript and in each interior design, you see them as on your phone, with the messages from one person on the right and the other on the left. The designers had trouble keeping the messages on their correct sides. My bafflement turned to frustration. How are you getting this wrong? It’s right there in the manuscript! I didn’t actually blow up like that at them. I just made notes off all the places where the errors occurred. The errors were fixed. I cooled down and realized that if they were all having the same problem, it might well be in the manuscript. In the course of formatting the messages, I had allowed Word to spawn sibling styles for right and left side messages. Failure to consolidate those styles meant that while it looked right in the manuscript, the work the designers did to transform the message styles was error-prone. Document your fancy-pants styles and apply them with rigor.

The upside of needing revisions to the interior PDF was that I found seven manuscript errors that had slipped through copyediting. The designers were all kind enough to work those corrections into their revisions.

Popping down to the EPUB

EPUB is the (family of) standards underlying most eBooks. Under the hood, your typical EPUB eBook is a ZIP file containing XML documenting the book’s structure, CSS files describing its stylings, HTML files for all the chapters and sundry sections, and image files for the cover and any interior artwork. Having worked on Microsoft’s XPS documents and early versions of its web browser, this isn’t unfamiliar territory for me. Nonetheless, I sought help to ensure Raether’s eBook offered readers a polished experience.

Two of the three design teams opted out of the EPUB part of the project. To their credit, the Word files for the interior PDFs can be converted to EPUB and Amazon’s corresponding format via tools like calibre and Kindle Create. The process turned out to be mostly automated and otherwise straight-forward.

The third designer signed up for the job and probably wishes he hadn’t. Little did he suspect I would draw him into a vortex powered by my neophyte ignorance and long history in software development. He provided me with .EPUB and .MOBI versions of the book. I downloaded a variety of eBook readers to my PC, iPad, and iPhone to test out the file. I sideloaded the MOBI onto my Kindle Paperwhite. I changed color schemes and font sizes. There were problems. Some of them I attributed to dodgy apps. But on the Kindle, Kindle apps, and Apple’s books, I expected perfection and got bungled drop caps at the beginning of each chapter. The cover image was either clipped or stretched. I freaked out.

The designer was flummoxed. It looked great when he tested in Kindle Previewer 3. I downloaded this program and told it open the file. The other eBook readers had opened the file instantly. Kindle Previewer 3 popped up a little progress window. It wasn’t just opening the file. It was ingesting it. In the progress window, text flashed by. Something about ‘Enhanced Typesetting’. It turns out that drop caps are facilitated by ‘secret sauce’ that Amazon adds to the file as you hand it off to their KDP self-publishing site. Apple and the other big eBook sellers likely do the same. EPUB is an independent standard, but the big players “add value” to provide a more premium experience than the core standard allows. I needed to trust the system(s) to make things right. I apologized to the designer for raising the alarm. Ever the professional and diplomat, he said the project had been a learning experience for both of us.

When the Music Stops

I have three great designs. Each captures an aspect of my story and illuminates it with an artists imagination. Each is right in its own way. I want readers to see all three and pick the one they like best. But that misses the point. There aren’t any readers out there who will pay their good money for my book based on the strength of my name. I tempt myself with the possibility of selling different designs through different channels and tell myself it would be a form of A/B testing. Traditionally published books get different covers in different markets. I have spare ISBN numbers to apply as needed. Could I attract attention with such a stunt? Yes. Would I sow confusion where I need clarity? Probably. Am I trying to rationalize avoiding a hard choice? Definitely.

When the music stops, there can be only one. Somewhere down the line there may be an opportunity to share the other designs via special editions. For launch, I need one cover to share and advertise.

There is one more test to run. One more set of data to collect. I need proof that that each design works. Please stay tuned.

A Clash of Copyeditors

June 8, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

Mad scientists must science madly. It is their nature. In my A Game of Edits post, I confessed to not applying appropriate controls to the experimental changes in my writing process between Rather’s Enzyme and The Gray God.

Having learned about patterns of weakness and error in The Gray God via AutoCrit, I unlocked the manuscript for Raether’s Enzyme and applied the tool there. The results were generally good, but I knew that I had introduced at least one new class of error, which I resolved to leave for the freelance copyeditor to find. Mostly this was just laziness my part.

Two for the Price of Two

The next step for Raether’s Enzyme was to send the manuscript off to a professional for copyediting. Years of work as a coder taught me that no matter how good you think your code is, you really should get someone to test it. That someone needs a keen eye for weakness, diligence, persistence, talent, and a very particular set of skills. If you want your software to be worthy of a customer’s time and money, it behooves you to get someone with those skills to challenge your code to be the best it can be.

The written word is like computer code. Errors in syntax and grammar can crash the interpreter in the middle of informing or entertaining the reader. Ambiguous references can leave the reader in an undetermined state. Inefficient use of language can lead the reader to look for a better solution. If you want your book to be worth a reader’s time and money, it behooves you to employ a good editor to spot your surviving errors and suggest improvements.

If one editor is essential and good, would two be better? Surely! I am a novice novelist and Raether is my first novel. There is room for improvement. Enough room that writerly insecurity alone was enough to rationalize hiring more than one copyeditor. I didn’t want to admit that I was acting to quell mere insecurity, so I came up with additional reasons.

  • Redundancy improves robustness. Raether is 114,000 words long. Even the best editors will miss or excuse something in all that text. The more editors you employ, the lower the odds of an error getting past all of them. If one editor fails to deliver for whatever reason—say, a pandemic–the other(s) might still come through.
  • A good editor is hard to find. The internet presents a cornucopia of talented freelancers with solid resumes and glowing testimonials. It might be hard to lose, but how hard is it to win? To find the editor with the skills to polish your book, the diligence to make it happen on schedule, and who you otherwise want to work with in the future. The odds of making that match go up the more editors you work with. (You can also improve the odds via word-of-mouth referral, but that requires having friends who know editors.)
  • Two more people will have read my story. Granted, an editing pass isn’t a normal reading and I’d be paying them to do so, but it still counts. Doesn’t it?

After this, the whole experimental methodology thing began to take a familiar turn away from rigor. Working with gradstudentfreelancers.com had been productive on the (premature) proofreading. The editor had pointed out some copyedit-level errors gratis. I knew he had more to contribute to the project. He would also enjoy a head start to the extent copyeditors must suppress their curiosity as readers about “what happens next?” and he knew the answer.

The search for a second editor led me to reedsy.com. The site features a marketplace of freelance professionals from various disciplines who post descriptions of their backgrounds and selections from their portfolios. Client ratings and testimonials provide additional information. An elegant search feature makes finding the right candidates straight-forward. Finding the right one for the job in this talented pool remains challenging for a noob like myself.

For my first pass, I searched for copyeditors who work on mash-up genre fiction. That produced a nice, small slice of the professional pie. One editor had a background and an eclectic portfolio that resonated with me. We exchanged messages and he cheerfully agreed to provide a sample edit of an excerpt from Raether. The excerpt was a slice from a few chapters with a good mix of dialog and narration. It also featured my which/that error. He returned the sample edit, Raether and my first contact with professional copyediting. He had fixed my which/that and various other minor errors, which was all to the good. He also rather aggressively changed my simple saids and askeds to more descriptive dialog tags.

There is a style schism in the writing world between those who limit dialog tags to said/asked, and those who like to mix in other verbs for more nuanced tone and general variety. In Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, he rules in favor of only using said. Cormac McCarthy declines to use any dialog tags, or quotation marks for that matter. Numerous beloved and successful writers have characters that whisper, grumble, reply, and query. I decided early in the writing of Raether that I would only break with the said/asked camp on special occasions. As a rule, I treated dialog tags as a form of punctuation and used them to slip pauses into characters’ lines and clarify the speaker in scenes where more than two characters were talking.

My initial reaction to the sample edit was: Dude, I wouldn’t allow me to make a stylistic change this sweeping at this late date. I cooled off and realized that his edits were, in their own way, cool. This fellow was engaged in the project on a level where he was creatively making it better. By the lights of his preferred style. It wasn’t my style. If I hired him but told him not to improve my dialog tags, I’d be asking him to fight his preferences and suppress his creativity for the length of the project. I’d be asking him to not do his best work. I declined his offer and revised my search criteria to cover the mystery and thriller genres.

In the interest of efficiency, if not fairness, I approached five new editors with my work proposal. One was no longer available and declined. The remaining four graciously provided sample edits. The number of corrections and suggests varied. Some went light with their virtual red pens. All had useful observations and Chicago Manual of Style corrections. One editor stood out for her ability to both correct the text and suggest improvements without trampling on the story’s voice. She found my which/that, moved the text towards reconciliation with Chicago, made good suggestions, and highlighted patterns of weakness that I had missed in my many passes over the manuscript. She was a good match for the project.

I accepted her offer. We exchanged messages and I briefed her regarding some of the manuscript’s eccentricities. She started the work on schedule, asked a few pointed questions during her edit, and delivered her final edit before the scheduled deadline. During the coronavirus outbreak of 2020. I was (and am) happy with both her work product and with the overall collaboration.

The Double-edit Interferometer

Sending one manuscript to two editors is akin to a double-slit experiment.

Doubleslit3Dspectrum

The interference pattern that emerges when you compare and combine the edits can tell you more about the text and the process than you would learn by looking at only one or either independently. In many places, the editors agree on a change. The editing waves reinforce each other. I don’t recall any cases where they recommended conflicting changes. There was no destructive interference.

The interesting part of the interference pattern broke the interferometer metaphor. Each editor made corrections that the other declined. One enforced Chicago’s deprecation of using capital letters for emphasis. Raether’s narration is sympathetic to the POV character of a given scene. The protagonist mentally capitalizes certain words: the Program, the Look, The Thing on the Screen. That edit lowercases these to align the manuscript with Chicago. The other editor left Megan’s capitalizations alone, but lowercased ‘internet’. It turns out that the 17th edition of Chicago declares that in general use, the Internet is now the internet. I had to buy my own copy of the style guide after searching the Internet internet failed to resolve the dispute for me.

Both editors were generous with their observations and suggestions, bringing complementary strengths to the project. The manuscript is better for their efforts. The strange curves of the story are polished so that the reader’s eyes might glide over them. Any surviving errors are artifacts of my combining their edits or stubbornly resisting their advice.

Raether’s Enzyme is ready to go to the book designers.

I can’t help but think of an old computer science joke:

Every program can be made one byte smaller. There is always one more bug. Therefore, at the end of optimization and debugging, all programs are one byte long, and wrong.

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