2010 Books

[drplokta]

36. Blackout by Connie Willis (see more here and here).
    
37. Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
    
38. My Own Kind of Freedom by Steven Brust
    
39. X Marks the Box by Daniel Blythe
    
40. A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton
    
41. B is for Burglar by Sue Grafton

Comments

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

I had so much fun copyediting My Own Kind of Freedom with Steven. I had access to online collaborative software at the time, so we got on the phone and the 'net and I opened the document on screen, shared so that he could see and also edit the same document at the same time, and then I read it through and each time I hit something problematical instead of writing out a query, I could just say "Do you mean?" or "should that be?" and with his permission, fix it, or otherwise I would explain my issue and sometimes the fix was what I expected but then every so often he would explain that a gap in understanding meant he had accidentally left something out of a previous chapter or he needed to completely re-write a section and he would go fix it and I would watch.

That wasn't the final revision, but it cleaned it up a lot and was just an amazing process for a copy editor to go through, to meet the authorial mind like that. It took us a couple weeks, I think, but I would do it again in a heartbeat. Of course, it helped that the book is amusing and reads well.

At least I think so. What did you think?

[drplokta]

Yes, I enjoyed it. He really does the characters well, and the plot makes at least as much sense as the average Firefly plot. Also, the formatting was much better than the average commercial ebook.

[drplokta]

Also, we use SubEthaEdit a lot for drafting chunks of Plokta in a similar process to what you describe above. Although it takes a bit of getting used to having several other people editing the document that's open on your screen.