Deborah Cooke: Author

Since I’m up to my eyes in a copy edit this week, you all get to hear a bit about it.

First, let me explain part of the production process. A copy edit is a phase of the production cycle for a book. After the book is delivered and revised and the acquiring editor approves it, the manuscript moves into Production – i.e. it begins the process of becoming a finished book. And the first step on this journey is the copy edit. A copy editor is hired to go through the book – they usually work freelance – to make corrections to the work in terms of grammar and usage, to insert the codes for typesetting, to check spelling and consistency and pretty much anything else. Then the marked up book is reviewed by the acquiring editor, who then sends it back to the author for review and approval. The book arrives with a style sheet, which lists the references used by the CE (copy editor) as well as any ongoing details when the book is part of a continuing series. Style sheets are carried forward, to ensure consistency between the books – as you might imagine, the Pyr style sheets are getting long!

This is all well and good, and part of the process in moving every book from manuscript to finished book. It used to be done in hard copies, which meant there was a lot of paper moving from NYC to the rest of the world and back. Now a lot of it is done digitally.

One of the strange things that happens in copy edits, though – one that seems to be more problematic when you write paranormal romance – is working out the usage of words that the author has made up. This also applies to words that are in common usage in the big wide world, but not yet in the dictionary. Paranormal stuff provides a lot of examples, as this segment of language is changing and evolving, due to the popularity of these kinds of stories. Five years ago, no one said “shifters”, for example, to mean shapeshifters, but now they do. This is why dicitonaries regularly revise their content – language is a shifting (haha) landscape.

My fave in the world of the Pyr is the word “shapeshifter” itself, because it’s one that we go ’round about almost every time we go to copy edits. This word is not in the dictionary – Merriam Webster 11 is the cited source here.

So, what happens when words used by the author are not in the dictionary is that the CE – very rightly – breaks them down into component words that are in the dictionary. Compound words are simply and routinely broken down into their components. “Townhouse” becomes “town house”, for example. If the author insists that the made-up word is part of her worldbuilding, then it can be added to the style sheet as a mark of the author’s particular style. In the case of my fallen angel books, we had compound words like “databanks” and “palmspam”, which are not in the dictionary but featured in that world, on the style sheets for the series.

With the Pyr series, we end up with “shape shifter” or “shape-shifter” instead of “shapeshifter”.

When we originally talked about shapeshifter (shape-shifter or shape shifter), I didn’t think the difference was that important. In English, we are very happy to put modifiers for our nouns right out in front of those nouns, either hyphens or spaces or not. “Green car” makes perfect sense to us. “Neo-conservative” also makes sense to us. Similarly, with established use, that space or hyphen can be removed and we will understand the meaning, even so: “cooperative”.

The problem comes when this word becomes a verb. With verbs, in English, the object of the verb always comes after the verb. So, “I shapeshift” means something very different from “I shape shift”. In the second example, the word space means that “shift” has become the object of the verb, and “shape” is the verb.

Think about this similar example: “I shape clay”. You understand immediately that clay is what is being shaped. Clay is the object of the verb; it is what is being acted upon by the verb. But with “I shape shift”, then “shift” is what is being shaped. That makes no sense.

The logical grammatical alternative to “I shapeshift” is “I shift shape”, which puts the verb and the object of the verb in the correct order for English usage.  But it means transposing the order of the words instead of just inserting a space. And yes, that’s what I’m doing this week. I don’t know how to shape shift – how will I even know “shift” when I see it? – so my guys will just have to shift shape.

Authors are widely reputed to not have a tremendous sense of humour about copy edits. This one teensy example maybe gives you an understanding of why!

And now back to it – Rafferty still has some shifting to do…