Walter White Wednesday 57

. . . which is an update on the progress of the Wanna Cook? project.  Since the final episodes don't air until August (August!!  What is AMC trying to do to us?), our deadlines had to change a bit from the original dates we had estimated with our publisher.  And no, it doesn't give us more time; we just start on these final eight a month later than we figured, so from August until November will be a two-month crunch.  Knowing that, we wanted to have everything else squared away as much as possible.

Enter the world of the copyedit.

You'll remember that we spent part of spring in the Great 30-Day Crunch, which I can assure you, was incredibly productive but also punctuated with a lot of random stress-related hollering (on my part, and not directed at my co-author, whose blog you should also be reading).  The result of the Crunch and post-Crunch tidying up was that the bulk of the book was drafted and line edited - yep, all 4.5 seasons, "extra ingredients," and sidebar material had been turned in, looked over, and edited for length and clarity.

Copyedits are the more delicate revisions.  Ensley and I worked hard (and anyone who says writing isn't "real work" around me had better be able to to outrun me) to turn in a clean, solid draft to ECW and judging from the number of items we needed to fix in the copyedit process, we accomplished our goal.  But.

Aspiring writers out there, get this through your skull.  Your baby won't be perfect.  Weird things will slip through that, although you know you wrote them, you'd be willing to swear had been added by gremlins.  They tend to be little things - an extra space here, a bullet point out of line there, maybe a bad verb tense. The bizarre thing is that, by this time, at least three intelligent people have looked at the same writing - and missed the same thing.  Will itsy errors more than likely remain in the final shelf copy?  Sigh.  Hopefully not, but probably.  I know my first book has a couple of freckles.

That being said, the copyedits have been completed, which means the bulk of the book is good to go.  We may have alterations to make depending on the events of the final eight episodes (won't that be a Tilt-A-Whirl of fun?), but we'll cross that bridge this fall.  We have a few "long pieces" to complete and we're still crossing our fingers that we can work out a few interviews with Breaking Bad cast and crew members.

What all that means is that we're in - well, not exactly a "lull," but we're not in the Crunch, either.  I have summer school classes to teach beginning next week and Ensley and I both have responsibilities galore associated with the upcoming Joss in June conference.  Before all that gets into full swing, we're headed down to Birmingham, Alabama to be guest professionals (I so wish we'd been titled "professional guests" that I think I'm going to call us that) professional guests at the Alabama Phoenix Festival.  We're part of the "Whedon track" and I'm very much looking forward to spreading the Whedon love down in the Deep South - not to mention checking out some of the other presentations and guests!

Look for updates from Alabama - including how our new promotional business cards (at the top of the post) are received!