STET

The copyedited manuscript for Eat the Dark showed up on my doorstep this morning -- "Special delivery," as my 5-year-old announced, kicking the oversized envelope from Random House across the entryway floor. I peeled it open with a combination of excitement and apprehension. It's always fun to see those additional pages inserted along with the manuscript -- the copyright page, the mystifying plethora of pages at the beginning with nothing but the word blank handwritten on them. This is the stage where I add the dedication and acknowledgment. It's become a superstition of mine not to dedicate a book until it reaches this point. Now I can start the thoroughly pleasurable task of thanking and crediting all of those who helped this book find its way into existence -- pure excitement.

And apprehension? You bet. Granted, the editorial department has been going over various incarnations of this tale with me for almost a year now, but as I look at the copy-editor's tiny, careful handwriting in the margins with questions like "So the door is made of metal, not glass?" and "how many cops were in the elevator, four or five?" I start to get all sweaty-palmed. My heart beats a little faster. It occurs to me that somewhere in the last hundred pages I might've committed some subtle but catastrophic technical misstep--the literary equivalent of a neurosurgeon nicking an arteriole--and as a result the satisfying resolution of my story depends solely on somehow shoe-horning my way through a logistical gaffe that every last one of us managed to overlook -- until now.

Irrational, yes. But still.

Chasing the Dead created a few moments of anxiety because of the way every chapter started with a time. The action was almost literally planned to the minute, and the owner of that tiny, careful handwriting had voiced some very valid questions about how certain events could have taken the time I said they did. At least this time around I was savvy enough to give myself a little wiggle room.

Lest my anxiety be mistaken for bitching, let me say right here and now that I salute the copy-editor, that patient and gimlet-eyed investigator of details, that dispassionate cataloger of dates and times, weights and measures, lengths and widths. Not only do I salute this person as I do anybody who performs a very specialized and critical task that I couldn't imagine myself performing except disasterously (imagine a clumsy and nearsighted child coloring a balloon with very sharp colored pencils, and there you have your allegory), but I salute them because they are the last in the long line of people that my story the best it can be. Afterward there will be cover art and blurbs and signings and reviews, but the copy editor is the final set of purely objective eyes to adjust the minute points of the text itself before it finds its way onstage. They work with the very smallest sets of screwdrivers.

And this is why we love them.

Of course, I'm only a third of the way through the manuscript. For all I know there's a timebomb waiting for me on page 298, as small and lethal as an anuerysm waiting to burst, spelled out in that small, careful handwriting with a polite little question mark at the end. Stay tuned.