Most Embarrasing Moment of the Week

I have many embarrassing moments that I could share, but I think I’ll pick my most embarrassing moment of the week. I received my copy edits this past weekend and was excited to get to work. This being my first time, I was particularly careful about reading the instructions. Even though I didn’t know what it stood for, I got the whole STET thing. In addition, I was told not to “accept” or “reject” any changes on the master file. I was in awe of this super-smart program when I ran my cursor over the crossed out lines and learned that this was even possible. I mean, click on “accept” and the line just disappears? How cool is that?

Because I couldn’t figure out how else I was supposed to do it, I opened up my latest version of my ms and got to work, looking from the master file to my own and searching for each little comma that needed to be added or omitted, painstakingly deleting lines and phrases, etc. An hour later, I was still not finished with chapter 1. And I realized that something was VERY wrong. I mean, they said this shouldn’t take me long at all. So, I closed out of both files and waited until the morning. When I finally connected with someone at Egmont and told him what I had done (because if we can’t laugh at ourselves, what are we going to do?) he set me straight. It was MUCH easier to simply look over all of their suggestions and comments, STET the few things I wanted to keep, and add a few lines here and there for clarification.

And how crazy-cool to see that my comments were color coded green, while the copy editor’s were blue, and my editor’s were red? I mean, wow! Sometimes I wonder how I got this far, because it feels like I’m stumbling in the dark.