Today's word of the day is: Copyedit

Copyedit: v. 1. a process by which typographical errors are removed from and/or introduced into a manuscript before it hits the printed page

At one point, I could have been a copyeditor. I used to find two or three typos in every book I read. They would appear to jump off the page at me, as if they were printed in bleeding red ink an inch bigger than the words around them. Generally, these were popular titles in paperback, which meant that they'd been through multiple printings without anyone noticing or bothering to fix these horrible transfiguring errors.

Not only did I have mad copyedit skillz (not a typo), I also had an old Webster's Dictionary that had been my father's, which included a whole section on proofreading marks--those squiggles and lines that mean add, delete, change, or leave a seeming mistake the way it is on pain of death.

One day in class, I absently marked up the front page of the school newspaper in red ink proofing marks just to pass the time and slipped the finished version under the office door on the way to my locker. By the end of the day, I'd been offered a job as production editor.

I was good. I was in the copyediting zone. But as I started doing more and more of my own writing, I discovered how hard it is to copyedit your own work. I couldn't do it. When the error-free version in my head differed from the typo-laden version on the page, all the typos turned invisible. There were everywhere but I couldn't see them until someone else inevitably pointed them out.

So here's the lesson: you can't copyedit your own work. You can learn to be more careful, you can use spell-check and other electronic tools, but you'll never catch all the bugs because you're just too close to the source. That's why your publisher sends the work to a copyeditor, and why you should hire one yourself if you're self-publishing.

Last night, I received an email from my publisher requesting the absolute final version of my first book because it's going to the copyeditor this week. This is a manuscript I've poured pored over (oops...that typo is real) for years, literally. Before I sent it in, I gave it one more reading and found a typo I'd never spotted before. Probably not the only one, either.

So I'm nervous about how the book will come back from the copyediting process. Surely there will be a few boneheaded mistakes on my part, which will be thankfully caught in time. There may also be a few of my mistakes that make it through into print, like all those other books I've spotted typos in over the years. And it's possible that new mistakes will be introduced.

I used to have a copy of BUT WHAT OF EARTH? by Piers Anthony, which was a bound copy of his submitted manuscript along with handwritten comments from at least three overzealous copyeditors and a second author brought in to "clean things up" without the first author's knowledge. Mr. Anthony then added his thoughts about each change and why the collective alterations dulled his original vision and made for a weaker book. I studied BUT WHAT OF EARTH? in detail and most of the time Mr. Anthony makes a persuasive point (although I sometimes sided with the copyeditors instead).

As I've gotten to know other published authors, I've sometimes had a chance to ask them whether a given typo was theirs or a copyeditor's. Did the author, for example, write "a grove of popular trees" as a mental slip in a book about popularity-obsessed teenagers, or was the change made by a copyeditor who had never heard of poplar trees and thought it to be an obvious misspelling? The author in question put the blame entirely on the copyeditor's shoulders, which shows another good reason for having copyeditors:

They make great scapegoats!