My poor copy-editor, dealing with London place-names. Fully half the queries on this book go something like this. “St. Laurence Jewry” — do you mean St. Laurence Pountney? “St. Giles Cripplegate” — do you mean St. Giles-in-the-Fields? “Aldgate” — do you mean Aldersgate? No, no, and no. Last book, it was people names instead; she kept double-checking to make sure this Edward whoever was not supposed to be that Edward whoever.

I’m glad she does it, of course. One of these days I will name two St. Laurence parishes when I only mean to name one. And to be fair, it took me a remarkably long time to sort the two St. Gileses from one another, and to figure out where each one was. But the queries amuse me. If this were a secondary-world fantasy, I wouldn’t repeat names half so often as the real world does, precisely because of this confusion.

I managed a while ago to teach myself the distinction between “that” and “which” — I couldn’t tell you when each one should be used, but my copy editor has corrected me on it only twice so far in this novel.

On the other hand, I still haven’t mastered the “farther” and “further” thing. On the other other hand, the Fowler quote given in this Slacktivist post validates my tendency to use “further” for everything. I’m happy to let me CE correct me on it, but hey, at least I’m not totally off-base.

Speaking of off-base-ness, one of these days I’ll figure out where I got my notions of hyphenation from. My CE disagrees with me quite frequently on that stuff.

It still saddens me to watch these books being corrected to American spelling. (“Corrected” because random bits of my spelling are British. I blame a childhood of reading Diana Wynne Jones?) It just seems wrong. Especially since the US and UK editions are printed from the same edit.

Of all the epigraphs I chose for this book, I think my favorite is the one taken from transcripts of Charles’ trial. It’s a brief exchange between him and Bradshaw, the Lord President of the High Court of Justice, arguing about the House of Commons and the jurisdiction of the trial, and while it was almost certainly not what Bradshaw meant to say, it kind of sums up the entire damn period for me:

The King. Shew me that Jurisdiction where Reason is not to be heard.

Lord President. Sir, we shew it you here, the Commons of England.

Back to the mines.

Am off to a roaring start. This is deliberate; I habitually work out how much I need to do each day in order to meet my deadline, readjust it to create a margin of safety, then push myself to overshoot the readjustment. It’s how we make deadlines work, here in my brain.

I should note, btw, that I misspoke slightly when I said the late arrival of the CEM was due to a mixup on my publisher’s end; I have a tendency to use that phrase to signify anything that isn’t my end, which is inexact. The mixup was on the part of the copy-editor. But it’s the same copy-editor I had for Midnight Never Come, which pleases me; I like continuity, and I like getting a little note from her saying she’s enjoyed reading these books. 🙂

Anyway. I’ve done all the mechanical work scheduled for today, and then some; I’ve about hit the limit of my usefulness on that front. (Brainpower, not time, is the real constraint on copy-editing speed. It doesn’t do me much good to read over the ms if I’m zoning out while I do it.) I have a small list of revision-y things to do in these pages, but I’ll leave them until later tonight, when I’ve regrown a little of my attention span. And then maybe go over some more pages, because we like being ahead of schedule, yes, we do.

You know who likes it even better? My publisher.

CEM is here.

Deathmarch has commenced.

I will either be silent for the next week as I try to plow through this at top speed, or posty like a posty thing as I find myself in desperate need of breaks from the work.

My copy-edited manuscript is expected to arrive tomorrow, and so I spent much of today re-reading In Ashes Lie.

I’m pleased to report that I like it, after all.

You’d think that would go without saying. But I spent so long head-down in this book, and so much of that time under a series of unpleasant stressors, that I truly lost my perspective on it. It’s the longest book I’ve ever written by a margin of nearly twenty thousand words, and approximately 87% more plotty than its closest competitors, which meant I had a difficult time holding the entire thing in my head at once; by the time I finished revisions, I was making changes half-blind, trusting to well-trained instinct that what I was doing would actually work. For all I knew, I was creating a Frankenstein monster of a book. But now, with the respite of having not looked at the thing for over two months, I find that — while there are some rough edges around those last-minute changes — on the whole, the thing works.

(Even the sentences, mostly. I can pay close attention to those in short stories, but in novels they tend to happen on autopilot, while my brain wrestles with plot and character and so on. Especially in a book like this. My autopilot, however, has gotten much better these last few years.)

Don’t get me wrong: I still don’t ever want to wrestle again with the fire-breathing hydra that is seventeenth-century English politics, and I still think this book deserves its moniker of “the Beast.” But that’s the voice of the months spent writing it, not the voice of the result. I don’t love it in the same way I love Midnight Never Come — no two books are ever the same — but I honestly believe Ashes has both Giant Spectacle and character moments that far surpass the best I was able to pull out for its predecessor. (The whole “burning down London” thing helped with the former.) It is a book I can be proud of.

And that two-month respite means I (hopefully) have the will to slog through the CEM, which is my last chance to catch any errors, polish those rough edges, and fix the sentences the autopilot did a less-than-spectacular job on. The production department appears to allot the same amount of time for copy-editing regardless of book length, so I’ll have to stick to a pretty rigorous schedule to get it done. But I’m actually looking forward to starting, at least.

(Ask me again in a week how much fun I’m having.)