Today I’m very pleased that Feathers of the Firebird is part of the blog tour for Charity Norman and her gripping new novel, See You in September. In this guest post, Charity writes about the hard editing work behind the polished surface of a new work.

The devil’s in the detail

By Charity Norman

I used to think that, once a book was ‘at the publishers’, the writer’s work was done. It was like making a cake: the writer would deliver a typescript, and a novel would emerge a few months later, shiny and beautifully jacketed.

Boy, do I know better now. It’s wonderful to finish the first draft of a novel (which in itself is probably the tenth draft!) and be ready for a publisher to see it – but even if they like it, there’s a lot of work still to be done.

First, there may be a structural edit, perhaps even a major rewrite. This was the case with See You in September. And when that’s done, there’s copy-editing: a line-by–line check. Some writers hate this part of the process, but I love it. I’m so grateful that a sharp-eyed professional has given their time to combing through every word, every comma, checking that I haven’t used the same adjective twice in two pages, or a malapropism, or some grammatical howler. We all have little tics, expressions we use too often – they are there to spot those. They save a writer from themselves.

Often there’s a short time frame for checking all the suggestions. And although I enjoy it, eventually my head begins to spin. Thousands of small decisions: should this be a semicolon? Is this word quite right? Is it fish-and-chips or fish and chips? It’s easy for the whole thing to grow out of perspective. Nothing in the world matters as much as that darned comma! My whole career is riding on it! There will be thousands of Amazon reviews sneering at that adverb!

That’s when my family gently steer me away, and suggest it’s time I went for a walk.

See you in September by Charity Norman is published by Allen & Unwin, RRP $29.99, available now.

More about See You in September:

It was supposed to be just a short holiday… but when Cassy is lured to an idyllic valley called Gethsemane it’s years before her friends and family see her again. Can her family rescue her before it’s too late? A dazzling, gripping new novel about a young woman lured into a clutches of a doomsday cult by its charismatic leader, Justin.