What I've Been Working On This Month

This month split pretty evenly between finishing something old and starting something new, which is about as normal as my desk ever gets.

A Ghost Like Me went back to my editor, Ryan, after I'd let it sit untouched for about six months. That distance turned out to be the best editing tool I didn't know I had. I'd read a paragraph and think, wow, I wrote that 🥰, and two paragraphs later, wow, I wrote THAT? 🤢🤮. The big structural task was shifting the entire manuscript's tense, which forced me to read every single sentence instead of skimming past the ones I already knew by heart. In the process I found a pet word I'd used more than seventy times and managed to whittle it down to nineteen. I also found several spots where I'd apparently typed a colon instead of a closing quotation mark. My pinky, it turns out, gets lazy around page 200. I spent an afternoon double-checking release dates on songs and products mentioned in the book, because nothing pulls a reader out of a story faster than an anachronism nobody asked for.