seanan_mcguire | Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.

There are a lot of ways to edit. Mostly, I edit on the computer, feeding drafts to my dedicated pool of machete-wielding psychopaths and trusting them to give me back something bloody, beaten, and better than it began. I also do a lot of my own rewriting, but like so many, I've "gone green," working almost entirely in the virtual world. It's not uncommon for a book to make it through multiple drafts without ever existing in a physical form. Not bad for a girl whose first two books were written entirely on typewriter, huh? (And no, you can't read them.)

Sometimes, though, the damage is too deep, and you need to take a new approach to making things not be broken. That's where the red-line edits come in. I have printed a copy of Late Eclipses—yes, the entire multi-hundred page epic—and am now going through it chapter by chapter with the red pen. It's fascinating. Passive voice and wishy-washy modifiers fall before the tide of crimson ink like trees going down before a particularly dedicated logging crew. Things that looked just fine on the screen make me cringe when I see them on paper. And then I fix them. Because I can.

There are definite limitations to the red-line process, not the least of which is "you have to carry whatever it is you're working on." But I gotta say, when I get to this particular level of nit-picky correction, where it feels like the book is winning, it's nice to know that I have a dark alley to lure the text unsuspectingly down. And in that alley, I have a brick. A brick made entirely of red ink and causing pain.

Sometimes my taste in metaphors worries me. But my manuscript looks like it's been the victim in a low-budget slasher film, so I really don't care.