I received the copy edited version of RAELIA back from my publishers a couple of days ago and, wow, I just have to say, copy editors are AMAZING!!! The incredible team at Pantera Press completely outdid themselves with my manuscript! There’s no way in a gazillion years that I could have picked up on even a fraction of the suggestions they pointed out to me – suggestions that have have made the story and characters waaaaaay stronger than I could have ever made them on my own!

It’s actually really incredible how much tighter my manuscript is now. I mean, for anyone who has ever received a copy edited version of anything back, you’ll know that it pretty much arrives hacked to pieces. Sentence by sentence, word by word, paragraph by paragraph – anything that doesn’t have to be there is cut, and anything that doesn’t need to be cut is shuffled around to sound better. Everything is analysed in order for it to become the best version of what it can be.

If you’re anything like me, when you receive a copy edited manuscript back, you kind of have a minor freak out where you’re convinced that you totally suck as a writer.

But after you take a few deep breaths and realise that while it looks like you should just throw it all out and write an entirely new book (or perhaps never write anything ever again), it’s actually a good thing that it’s so hacked to pieces. Because it means that once it’s clean again, it’s going to be a whole lot better than you could ever dream.

That’s what’s happened with RAELIA.

And despite how scary the manuscript looked when it arrived on Thursday, the fact is that it only took me three days to go through it and fix it up again. That’s, like, a ridiculously short amount of time. Because you see, unlike a structural edit (which came before the copy edit), the corrections made this time around were many, but minor. I was actually finished with most of the small things within a day – a day! – of receiving it back. There were just a handful of larger plot/character changes that I wanted to give more consideration to, which is why I took the weekend to mull over the possibilities.

Long story short, I’m absolutely over the moon with the (current) end result of my manuscript. (I say ‘current’ because it still has to go through the proofreading stage, but hey, for now I’m stoked with what it is!) So I want to say a HUGE ‘thank you’ to the entire copy editing team at Pantera Press because you guys seriously rock!!