February 1, 2006
Yesterday I started re-writing The Serpent's Kiss, the second Derek Stillwater novel being published by Midnight Ink in 2007. In January I received an e-mail from Wade, the New Titles editor at MI (versus Barbara, the Acquisitions Editor) with a couple pages of edits. The first book didn't have many and we'll apparently deal with those in the galleys. Anyway, he wanted them by June, but I saw that The Devil's Pitchfork production schedule essentially begins in May, so I scheduled in the rewrite to start Feb 1, 2006. I jumped the gun by a day but I thought I was at a reasonable stopping point on the novel I was working on.

I have read the notes over a couple times since I got them, not to consciously deal with them, but to let them sort of soak into my subconscious and let them ferment for a while. I'm pleased with many of them, minor things, really. He noted that I had two characters, one named Roger Taplin and one whose last name is Taplin-Smithson, and since they're not related, I should change one of them. So I did. Easy enough. By the same token, in Pitchfork there's a major character named Spigotta, and in Serpent there's a character named Spigotta. He wondered if it was intentional, and if it wasn't, to change it. It wasn't, so I did.

Those are the easy kinds of changes and I'm grateful he caught them. Some of the other changes are story changes, nothing huge, more a matter of timing and proportion. He notes that one of the character had an affair with her boss that resulted in a sexual harrassment lawsuit and subsequent promotion of dubious value, and he felt there was a disconnect in how this was presented, especially earlier in the book when the two characters are interacting. He was right, and it's like that undoubtedly because I hadn't fully explored their relationship earlier in the book. Ultimately it was a minor change, but considerably more nuanced than I would have thought. The real question was, how much information do you give the reader and when? I had showed tension between the two in the beginning that increasingly escalated throughout the book. He thought the way I did that was fine. He just felt there should be some earlier indications as to the nature of the tension--not giving details away, necessarily, but perhaps allowing us to see the shape of the elephant.

Those are the ones I dealt with yesterday. Some of the harder ones are coming, and I find it enlightening that they mostly have to do with keeping the relationships consistent and satisfying for the reader. If you create, for instance, some sort of sparked friendship between the two main characters, then you kill one of the characters in the end (or at least the other character thinks the character is dead), it's important that they react in an appropriate way. Tricky stuff.

Anyway, that's editing and it's where I'm at.

Best,
Mark Terry