We have a final text!

My editor and I have been spending the past few weeks batting the manuscript for Cover the Mirrors back and forth between us (how did people do this before email?!), highlighting and adding comments and cutting and rewriting and extending and altering, and we've now got a book both of us are happy with. Well actually, although obviously I can't speak for Will, I'm not just happy with it: I'm chuffed to bits. But anyway.

Rewinding a few weeks, I can honestly say that I was looking forward to the edit, for several reasons. At that point, I hadn't revisited Cover the Mirrors for quite a while, and so I was able to look at it with fresh eyes and the increased experience I acquired during the course of writing my second book and starting my third. This also gave me a little distance and allowed me to be a little more objective about the novel (no "What do you mean, my kid's got a squint?!"), although not to the degree of losing all my protectiveness over my work. I think total dissociation would be a bad thing, and unnecessary besides.

Secondly, I had written collaborative work in the past - the earliest cases being in high school English and the most recent being something I did with a friend - so I do know how to share, so to speak. If I can work with a co-author (although I am under no illusions about CTM; there's no way I could have written that with someone else), I can work with an editor.

Thirdly, I had had feedback on CTM from proofreaders, so it wasn't unchartered territory there either. And finally, I actually like editing. When I was writing the first draft of CTM, everywhere I looked I saw writers moaning about how stressful editing is, and how hard it is to perform surgery on your artistic offspring. I'd never had any problems with this when writing shorts, but thought that perhaps it was different with novels. It wasn't. Not only was it nice to revisit, polish and improve the parts of the book I liked; attacking those I didn't - whether to modify, rework or destroy them altogether - also felt positive because they were no longer dragging the good stuff down with them. For that reason, I was rather looking forward to going through that process again with a professional editor.

And my hopes were borne out by experience. I can honestly say (and I do mean honestly - I wouldn't post this if I didn't) that the editing process was just fine. When I read through Will's comments, there were no "Over my dead body" moments. We discussed the entire manuscript, balancing historical accuracy and likely reader responses and issues of clarity and character, and the book is much better for it.

This is not to say that the book has been changed drastically, to the point of being unrecognisable. No, no. To use the 'surgery' analogy again, I'd compare it more to botox than a full surgical facelift with turkey-neck repair and those creepy plumping injections in the lips. (Except that unlike botox, the aim wasn't to paralyse sections of my story.) And while the text has been changed in quite a few notable ways, all for the better, all this was achieved without any unpleasantness.

If any of you out there are cynical enough to assume that such an outcome could only be achieved through one or both parties having a passive, opinion-shy temperament that allows others to walk all over them, you would be wrong. Will's job is to say what he thinks - tactfully, yes, but without flinching - and while I am not an individual of few opinions (as you may have gathered if you've read my blog prior to this entry), neither am I precious about my work. If something doesn't work in anyone's mind apart from (or including!) my own, I will change it or get rid. Likewise, if Will queried something that I could defend as accurate or necessary, he was fine with that, too. Perhaps I've been lucky, but I think it was an enjoyable and rewarding process.

(It also occurred to me that editors must get used to having some very strange conversations with people they've never met, or met only once or twice before. When you think of the range of books in the world, and the issues presented therein that will almost certainly require in-depth discussion at times, the mind boggles.)

So yes - the final text for the book is set. Ze editor and myself are both happy with it, and the next person to work on it will be the copyeditor, in preparation for the proofs and then the book itself. I had to persuade myself that it was ridiculous to keep on re-reading the book again and again, just to be sure I hadn't missed something, but I eventually got to a point where I could accept this, and so I emailed it to Will pronto before I could change my mind and opt to read through it another five times this evening.

The next step: my trip to London. I've only been twice in my life (and neither of those occasions involved a visit to the area around Macmillan HQ, or at least not as far as I remember), so that should be interesting.

I've made a new necklace for the trip, too. It's designed to co-ordinate with my pinstripe outfit made by the multi-talented Heresy-Emma, and features three colours of faux pearl (cream, black and purple), bits of purple ribbon, obsidian chips and amethyst beads, all strung across six strands of knotted wire. It's delish, even if I do say so myself.