The trap of self-editing...

I don't mind self-publishing -- my Abigail Massey at McAdam Station stories for children are self-published and they've done very well; this blog is self-published, come to think of it.

What concerns me is not so much the self-publishing as the self-editing.

(maybe I'll write about the overuse of underlining and italics to create emphasis someday... but not today [which might lead to an entry on the overuse of parentheses {uh oh... I'm trapped...}]).

Self-editing is, in my opinion, one of the greatest chasms into which a writer might fall (including the placement of a preposition at the end of a sentence, which I narrowly avoided there [only to get myself caught up in another one of these parentheses spirals]).

Case in point. I finished the draft of my Abigail Massey Christmas novella in December of last year and, over the course of January, went over it at least five times, revising, rewriting and editing. I consider myself to be pretty good with grammar and punctuation and all that so I felt pretty good about editing my own work.

Fine. So, at the end of January, I sent the revised and refined (might I say "perfected") manuscript off to the graphic designer with whom I work (my sister, Lynn, who is as fine a designer as I've ever met [and I'd say that even if she weren't my sister {uh oh, more brackets}]). I was confident that it was in finished and final form.

Enter the trap.

Lynn did her usual amazing work over the next three months, coming up with an absolutely gorgeous cover design, an equal amazing title page design and a beautifully laid out, easy to read book. Wonderful.

Now it's mid-April and Lynn sends the design back to me for review. I'm blown away by the beauty of it. Who cares about the writing? This thing will sell itself.

I want to be a careful, detail-oriented publisher, however (did I mention that, when you self-publish, you are writer, editor AND publisher?) so I figure I should read the entire novella again, just to make sure no sentences got cut off in the design process, no paragraphs got shuffled, no pages went missing.

Crash and burn. Lynn made few, if any, mistakes, to be sure. Her work was practically perfect: I think I found three paras that weren't properly indented and one extra period at the end of a sentence. (and I'm not sure those weren't mistakes in my own draft). Other than that, perfect.

But, who the heck edited this thing? Who was responsible for making sure the writing flowed smoothly, the diction was appropriate and the story consistent? Whoever it was did a terrible job.

Despite my very careful revisions throughout December and January, I still found in April that I had some significant revising and editing to do.

For example, I still had characters going back in time: at one point early in the story Abigail looks at her watch and sees that it's 9:50 a.m.; five paragraphs later, she squeals "Oh Golly, it's half-past nine..."

How does an editor miss that kind of thing?

And how does he miss the fact that the author used the word "up" three times in a single sentence and then, one paragraph later, "mirror" three times in two short lines?

Luckily for me, the three months Lynn spent working on the book gave me time to gain a little objectivity and perspective on the writing. Time, plus the fact that it was now presented to me in a completely different layout and format, allowed me the chance to distance myself from the story and see it for what was truly on the page, not for what I had intended to write.

I ended up sending Lynn about 40 edits that should have been caught in the original review and editing process.

But that is the trap of trying to be your own editor: you can't see your work clearly unless and until you put some time (three months or more) and some distance (provided through reading it in a new format) between the author and the written piece.

With time and distance, you regain the ability to read what is actually on the page, to see the problems afresh and to lose your own egotistical love for your own writing.

Self-publish all you want. But self-edit with extreme care and caution.