Whisper House Press

Notes from the desk of the editor are offered in the interests of personal posterity and transparency for writers and other potential editors who wish to learn from my experience.

– the editor

Today’s editorial pass:

• I went through the corrections identified by a third of authors (all who have responded—they are fast!) and fixed those items.
  • I’ll keep up with this as the corrections continue coming in. See my last post re: my instructions to authors on responding to issues identified in our galley proofs.
• I double-checked that we’ve got em-dashes (“—”) and not hyphens or en dashes to indicate pauses or cut-off dialogue/action.
• I also did a control-f to find all open ellipses (“. . .”) and changed them to closed ellipses (“…”).
  • CMOS says open ellipses are preferred, but why use the extra characters for those spaces? This’ll be a house style thing. We just need to be consistent, whatever we choose.
• I then went through the 131 instances of ellipses and checked the spacing before and after to ensure there weren’t any oddball spaces before or after each (there were a few dozen—I fixed those).
  • There are no instances of four periods in a row, thankfully.
  • I checked for capital letters following ellipses, doing my best to ensure the starts of new sentences get capital letters, and continuations of paused thoughts do not. Luckily, we caught most of these in the initial rounds of edits, so I made only one change here.
• Next? Checking for all variations of AM / A.M. / am / a.m. (and the same for PM variations) and ensured all were formatted in line with our house guide.
• Two fun facts:
  • The manuscript currently sits at 78,042 words.
  • There are 54 instances of the word “fuck,” which amounts to just shy of .07 % of the text.

I’ve received notes back from many authors and am awaiting responses from as many as 21 of those remaining. I am sending out one reminder email with an attached revised galley proof document. Anyone who hasn’t responded within the allotted time frame will miss their chance to respond before I create a review copy for Kirkus, Apex, Locus, etc.

I’ve also been working on the trigger warnings. I sent out a google survey some time ago (a “form”) and asked for author assistance on this point, and I’m inputting their stuff in the voice of the editor with consistency in the end matter. This section is still in development but isn’t long.

I’m continuing to keep my detailed tracker up to date with the most recent info on the project.

Until next time (and it’ll be my last check-in for a month, as I’ll be in France doing a writing thing)… I pushed hard to finish the review copy of this book prior to the trip so I can work only on my own writing once I arrive in the countryside. J’écris beaucoup!

– steve

Behind-the-Scenes Headquarters