I just got our manuscript back from the editor. Y’all we have an editor! I cannot tell you how long I have wanted an editor. (In case you missed it, Melinda and I have co-written a book about caregiving which has been accepted to be published.) This weekend I sat and reviewed all the changes and corrections in our manuscript. It was tedious. It was hours and hours of work, but it was glorious! To have someone else, a professional, combing through the words and smoothing them out…just a dream.

Usually, I beg my smart friends to read and edit my work before I self-publish, but mostly I do the corrections they recommend myself. I am a writer, but not a speller or one who knows grammar. Funny, isn’t it? I just love God’s sense of humor. I am grateful daily for spellcheck and I can handle grammar up to about 5^th grade level. All those years teaching came in handy on that topic. Yet, semicolon use still eludes me. Passive voice is a mystery. Don’t even get me started on comma splices. The more intricate it all gets, the more confused I become.

I have dreamed what it would be like to have my work handed to me with all those things corrected and it is as glorious as I had imaged. There is a little button to click that says “accept change.” I push it and voila the correction is made. It’s like magic. This is especially wonderful because by this time in the publishing process I have read this book 1,000 times. My eyes are crossed and I can’t see anything objectively any longer. To have fresh eyes, that are not mine, that know what to look for, is so energizing. It doesn’t even matter to me that there are over 4,000 changes to be made. (A huge percentage of those are semi-colons!) Just having it done is such a relief. Like a stone lifted off of my back.

The best thing about having an editor is that she leaves my writing style as it is. My voice, and Melinda’s voice, are intact. It still sounds like each of our respective writing, just better. Smoother. With more finesse. The flow is improved significantly. It is just going to make it a better book for our readers. Such a relief!

In addition to an editor, we also have a design team! It is hard to imagine such a thing! Our cover is nearly complete! We told them our vision and it appeared out of thin air. Just what we wanted! Magic!  Next up, is the formatting of the inside pages of our journal. We can’t wait to see what they do with it. We are deep in the process and learning so much about it from our publisher. After formatting and design, we will be to the marketing stage. I am looking towards a new blog platform, creating a community for our readers, and multiple other surprises coming soon. You will be hearing more as we get closer to our launch date…so get ready!