This weekend I finished my first pass pages for PLANETSIDE. If you’re not publishing savvy, what that means is that I got a formatted copy of my book and went through it one last time to make any last changes. It was a pretty short turn, and as I was doing it I had some interesting (at least I think so) thoughts, and thought I’d share them.

Seeing your book as an actual book for the first time is pretty surreal. Not much to add to that, really. Not going to lie…it was cool.

It’s scary. When I started, the instructions said that I can make small changes. It didn’t specifically forbid me from doing larger things (I could attach a word document if I needed to change more than two lines in one place) but it didn’t encourage it. So going in, there’s this nagging thought of ‘what if I really hate something?’ What if I want to rewrite a chapter that isn’t working for me any more? This is exacerbated by a couple of things: 1) I *always* find things I want to change when I go through my older work, and 2) I haven’t actually read PLANETSIDE in a long time.

For clarity, I did copy-edits about two months ago, so I have seen the book recently. But with copy edits you don’t really read the whole thing…not even close…at least I didn’t. I went from edit to edit, and the only time I dug in and read more than a page or so was if the copy editor pointed out a consistency issue (of which I didn’t have many.) And my editorial pass, back in August, was pretty light, so I didn’t read every page then, either. Honestly it’s been about a year and a half since I read the entire book. It was back in June of 2016 when I did my round of close edits for my agent. Before that, I read it, oh, I don’t know, a thousand times. But since then…nope.

So. Yeah. What if I hated it?

No matter how many times and how many people read a book, there are still commas in the wrong place. I did edits. I did copy edits. And in this pass I still found seven or eight commas that were wrong. Not stylistically wrong…objectively not in the right place. My personal nemesis: the independent clause combined with a dependent clause via a coordinating conjunction (Pro tip: No comma needed. Trust me, I’m an English teacher.)

I didn’t want to change things. Much. My fear that I’d want to rip a chapter apart didn’t materialize. There were a couple of spots where I might have rearranged some sentences if I had time, but I didn’t feel like there were entire passages. And I was able to do everything I wanted to do with small changes. I did a few things that I thought I’d done earlier…for example, I got rid of the word ‘crazy’ and replaced it with alternatives. Another thing I did was changed some of the technology to fit what I’m doing in PLANETSIDE 2 (not the real title.) I made the way the heads up displays work more consistent, and I eliminated a couple things where I had low-tech things, replacing them with cooler stuff. But really that was about it.

The most important thing. The coolest part of reading my book cover to cover is that I kind of fell in love with it again. It’s been a lot of work, and I’ve been working hard on book 2, so it was really a welcome revelation. I really like this book. I’m proud of it. I don’t know that I’d have said that a month ago, which sounds silly, I know. I mean, I’m going to have a published book, so of course I should be proud. And I was, from that perspective. But reading it again in just a few sittings, I see it so much more clearly now, and I think as I get closer to release date, that’s going to help me talk about it and do all the things that authors have to do.

Last note. I think the most unexpected thing for me was how it has changed how I’m thinking about book 2. Book 2 has been hard. I have a plot that I like, but it’s not where I want it yet, and that’s been frustrating. Re-reading book one showed me some things that I did there that I’ve failed to do in book 2 (most notably with interior thoughts and character attitude) that I can incorporate to good effect. It’s got me more motivated to get back to work.

PLANETSIDE releases on July 31st, From Harper Voyager

Tags: Debut, Debut Science Fiction, Mammay, Planetside, Science Fiction, Scifi